Precarious at best....

　　 Some old-time drinking thoughts creep back into my head sometimes saying, "You deserve a drink." I have to pull the reins back on my wild horse impulses. If I lose these inhibitions, I will lose myself again. Death by reflex. Death by habit. Death by alcoholism.
　　 I will not drink today.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 16)

Too Stoned Too?

   One morning with a prospective client, a waterbed store owner, I reached into my breast pocket to hand him my business card and a pack of rolling papers flew out of my pocket and onto his desk.
　Playboy would not have liked to see that move. I always could have been worse. As could anyone. Alcohol told me that drunk and sobriety tells me that sober.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 15)

The Great Excluder

(Surimi):     Gentlemen, we are pack animals, like wolves. Separated from the pack, the chances of survival diminish. Alcoholism is this disease of separation. The alcoholic needs alcohol to the exclusion of all else. Recovery is largely joining or rejoining the human race.
   Connecting with self, reconnecting with self.　Connecting with others, reconnecting. Overcoming alcoholism, the Great Excluder.    The irony and paradox of Happy Hour can silence even me.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 14)

Unintended Consequences

(Surimi):    A knife, intended for his throat: the unintended consequences of alcoholism, far beyond the destruction caused by alcohol alone. The　effects with no provable cause and effect. The insanity of alcoholism does not operate under the rules of logic, of this cause or that. Unknowable, unexpected heartbreaks and disaster. Collateral damage. Damaged souls drawn to one another.
　

   Alcohol consumed.   Sanity consumed.
   Catastrophic consequences inevitable.
　 This cannot be good. Ever.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 13)

Inside out

   The further alcohol took me away from myself, the less I understood that I was losing my foothold. From the outside, I am sure it looked like I was becoming more and more selfish, but increasingly, I was not feeding myself, I was feeding my disease. The more selfish I may have appeared, the more
my disease had dissolved my self away. from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 12)
　

Every example breaks every rule...

   The more I drank, the more I drank. So I am, I am, I am an alcoholic.　

(Surimi):   An alcoholic's life story is in three parts: The childhood before the first drink, the times from the first drink to the last drink, and thirdly, recovery or death. As usual, this and all other cookie cutter oversimplifications require hip boots, Gentlemen. It is only in individual examples that these waters get muddied. Birth. Insanity. Recovery or death.　　

　　 Every example breaks every rule, including this rule.　　 I am alcoholic. We are alcoholics. La-ti-da, ti-da, ti-da. 　

　　 I did not drink today.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 11) 　



Until after the last drink....

(Vatchi):    Not only do I think that alcohol robbed him of his adulthood (some say, and, of course, it's an exaggeration, that an alcoholic stops maturing at the beginning of his drinking career and remains stagnant, never reaching adulthood, until after he drinks his last drink), but in some sense, Jim was robbed of his childhood, too. 
   His childhood memories seem memories of memories of memories. A life not lived, and what was lived, barely remembered, and what's remembered- distorted.    Mirrors in a Funhouse, Sotto. You asked if nothing could have stopped him. I don't know. But I do think that nothing could have stopped his alcoholism. What has not yet been destroyed could yet be saved. His history cannot be rewritten. With any luck and a lot of hard work, he can save what he has left. Who, alcoholic or not, can do more than that, Sotto?   from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 10)

My Serenity Bracelet

　　 When I first got out of Lakewood Hospital's Rehab Wing, I wore the plastic patient's I.D. bracelet for three months. That bracelet was my Scarlet Letter and my Red Badge of Courage, ever reminding me that I have a sickness, an illness, an identity that I could not change, that I am an Alcoholic Forever. One of my forevers would have to be that I would have to change if I were to remain sober. I did not know it then, couldn't have known it, but that plastic I.D. bracelet was like my own personal "Serenity Prayer" incarnate, unspoken, felt, neither consciously known nor understood.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 9)

no life, no style

   The now near empty bottle of vodka did not merely evaporate. The blackout drinker who had become my life consumed more alcohol than time itself could remember.

   The full ashtray told me that I had smoked cigarettes all night long.

   The empty life had finally stopped talking to me. The empty me had finally stopped listening.

   Nothing, then less than nothing.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 8)

Finishing My Research

Before I hit bottom my first time I felt as if I had no choice. Drinking was all I knew. Sobriety was not an attractive option. Unknowable. Sobriety would be an absence, a void I could not suffer. All my 'people, places and things' were immersed in alcohol. Addicts don't quit on the basis of one or two negative consequences. Using despite negative consequences is at the core of addiction's definition. It took repeated bursts of my alcoholic champagne bubbles for my Alcoholic Stock Market to crash (mixed metaphor, no doubt). The idea of successful control of my drinking had to be smashed. In the meantime, I remained smashed. I could not stop and then I could not stay stopped.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 7)

Sink. Sank. Sunk. Drink. Drank. Drunk.

　　


Worthless, feeling worthless, alcoholism tears you down, like spousal abuse, until eventually you feel that you deserve no better. Emotions eroded by the flood of alcohol and in its wake, emptiness.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 6)

Rejection

My problem was not that I had been rejected, as each of us is rejected in this life on one level or another. Dealing with the emotion of rejection or another emotion or any emotion, for that matter, was the problem. I drank emotions and my medication became my poison.

   Now what? Now sober. What next?


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 5)

This is your glass talking

An empty glass told me that I had been drinking.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 4)

Dem bones, dem bones, dem crazy bones

  I've heard from staunch Creationists that God buried dinosaur bones the world over as a test of our faith in Him. My theory is that Demon Alcohol forced me to dig my own grave with every intention of throwing me into it. Dem bones, dem bones, dem crazy bones.


from
 All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 3)

Bowled Over

When I can remember that most of my anxiety is about an unknown future and my depression comes from reliving my past, I can then be happier living in the present moment, so long as a tiger doesn't leap upon me unexpectedly like that goddam last one did!


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 2)

Back through square One

    Drinking used to be one of my three most favorite things to do.

    Eventually I forgot the other two.



from
All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 1)

Surimi preaches to the Choir

(Surimi): "You will meet a tall, dark stranger," the Gypsy fortune-teller told me. And then I did.

But correlation is not causation.

Coincidence is in this and any story.

And this is Jim's story and in Jim's story, the tall, dark stranger is a beaker full of alcohol.

Change the people, places and things in your world and your world will change, too.

Yet, a tall, dark stranger is deep within Jim's brain. Don't drink today. Reach inward for self. Reach outward for help. Outward to help. Connect.

Do not drink today.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 89) 

Chapter 88 draws to a sober close...

Sober alcoholic role models? They seem to be few and far between. Alcoholism apparently has not yet come out of the cultural closet. Is it voodoo fear? Are we zombies in recovery? Am I to wear some 'scarlet letter' and die in shame? Is there an historical A.A. paranoia that feeds itself instead of helping a world of alcoholics not yet in recovery?

Change yourself, Jim. Talk to yourself, Jim. The world can wait. Is it me who must find patience?

Yes, Jim, yes.

“It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. “

Oscar Wilde

Did you know that you would get this far? Did it turn out like you thought? What do you control and what controls you? Are you finally tiring of questions asked? Is letting go the ultimate control?

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 88)

Wired Weird

"The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs."

Viktor E. Frankl

I can have drunk dreams sober, but I can’t have sober dreams drunk.

Wired Weird: The brilliant deduction of some of the best scientific minds, simplified.

I’m wired weird.

We’re wired weird, we what-cha-ma-call-its.

You’re wired weird, if you’re one of us.

He, she, it are wired weird.

They? What about them?

Not them. They’re not wired weird. They can think when they drink.

 

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 87)

Upside Down Drunk

The drinking used to work. To be fun. A two hour escape from the world. Slowly, over the years, it went from three or four times a week and three or four drinks at a time to every day and seven or ten or more and drinking sprees and blackouts and hospitals. Hitting bottom and periods of sobriety and relapses and more bottoms and hospitals and vicious cycles.

I don't know how much brain I've lost to alcohol and how much depth I have achieved from my merry-go-round of relapse and recovery, but I know I cannot drink today.

I measure my life by days instead of drinks today.

Humble. Thankful. Grateful. Alive.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 86)

'this loose-fitting garment'

　 I cannot chase (must not) this dream, this sobriety. To chase sobriety is to chase the next drink. Doing push-ups for the next drink.

　
　　 This is not a chase. It is an embodiment. I must enfold it as it enfolds me. Gently. Sobriety, 'this loose-fitting garment.' This I must have, and the word 'must' destroys it and the word 'have' destroys it.

　
　　 Like a snowflake, sobriety melts upon my tongue. The hundred states of water. And life. The vessel that contains it. And movement, the silence that describes it. And colors that reflect it.

　
　　 I did not drink today.

　
　　 Serenity. This silence of letting go.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 85)

　 

Chapter 84 finds a title: "All Drinking Aside"

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." -

Laurens Van der Post

Compulsively focusing on others can really be used as a form of procrastination, of denying my own problems, of working on my own steps towards recovery....

Gripped with fear, my anxiety attacks return. My fears have been spelled out in the nightmares others are living. My drunk dreams explain me. I feel separated.

Night sweats, drunk dreams. Like a wild locomotive with no breaks. Noise- white noise, black noise- Adrenaline. A drunken grip my drunk dreams hold on me. The nightmare reality of what reality was like. Insane drunkenness. The abyss of drunkenness. Anxiety unbound....

 

 

from All Drinking Aside: The Destruction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of An Alcoholic Animal (Rough Draft, Chapter 84)

"Drunken Donuts"

Dance your feet

Down the street

Come by bike or car

Catch a train

Sun or rain

Even if you fly by plane

Catch the beat

Dance your feet

To where the Sprinkles are:

Dunkin’ Donut Sprinkles

"What was that?" you ask. It simply is a broken fragment from the last drunken jingle I wrote, yet never had published, for Dunkin' Donuts. I call it "Drunken Donuts." Good as I still envision this jingle to be, in its entirety, I get melancholy in my mind's ear. It was written after my first relapse, before my second sobriety. Maybe one day...

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 83)

100 Proof? Try Zero Proof.

"You can't handle the proof."

 

The Court of Public Opinion will convict me. "You can't handle the proof."

The Masquerade of Time will dispel Recovery's urgency. "You can't handle the proof."

I'm addicted to self, a lifetime of self. "You can't handle the proof."

My disease trails me like a slug praying to catch up. "You can't handle the proof."

What is my disease and what do I have left? "You can't handle the proof."

Sobriety is my long-last act of love. I can almost handle the truth.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 82)

An Aboriginal Ritual

At my second two-week Rehab at the Institute for Human Development (now John Brooks), high on Librium as we detoxify on alcohol and other drugs, one guy gave five or six of us a new haircut, one after the other. That was the symbolic start of the emergence of a new and sober self for me. An aboriginal ritual. "Today you are a man. Free of alcohol and drugs. Go forth. Build a new life."

None of that was said aloud, of course, and the symbol of the haircut and the reality of the haircut were quite different things.

Am I splitting hairs?

Yes, but wisely (Har-de-har-har hair).

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 81)

Morris

One regular, Morris, had a distended stomach from alcohol-induced liver disease. His liver bled into his body, or so it seemed from his bloated belly. I don’t know. I just know that his liver was destroying him and his abdomen was filled with blood. Internal bleeding. Dying. A sick liver sending ammonia through the blood and to the brain as a byproduct of its dysfunction, causing him personality disorders. I'm not a doctor. I don't know the exact details. I just know what I saw in Morris’s case. An Internet search later confirmed this basic assumption of the ammonia/alcoholic/liver disease connection. What a strange and terrible sight was the result of his liver disease, his alcoholism and his extreme cocaine use. Alcoholic insanity. Ammonia insanity.

I breathe in now, thinking about Morris and I sigh and look down, bewildered, just as he did time and again before he disappeared from the wilderness slash unreality of the bar. I can only picture him crawling away into some alternate reality to die, an aging Eskimo in ice, dying. Insane, then simply dead.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 80)

Smug (or Snug as a Bug in a Rug?)

I turn over my fears as I’m walking down the street one cloudy day. The autumn leaves turn over themselves on the sidewalk before me.

And then I hear something. Far away I hear a literal bird singing. And then it hits me. This is what turning over my fears and my addictions has finally given me. My hearing. My unfocused hearing. After three years sober I turned over another addiction, my addiction to cigarettes, and here’s what I noticed: Not that I would live longer, but that I could live more fully in the present. Yes, I could taste better and smell better without the tobacco and liquor in my mouth and on my breath. But the real reward is not delayed for some unforeseen future, but lived in the present, because I was not focused on the next drink of my addiction and the next smoke of my addiction.

I could live more fully in the now.

I turn over my fears as I’m walking down the street. The autumn leaves turn over themselves on the sidewalk before me.

I live more fully in the now.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 79)

this is where

This is a way to survive, to think that you're surviving. This is when the only food is the juice in my vodka and cranberry. This is when it takes me two solid hours to get out of bed and put on a pair of shoes. This is when there is no next drink, there is just this one long drink that goes on forever. This is where there is no up or down and I can only move sideways. This is where waking up is like falling through a stage prop wall. This is where I carry my addictions in a cardboard box as if I were moving to another location. This is finding no location and the box is empty. This is standing and not being able to move. This is drunk and crashing, falling, falling through a bottom, tumbling. This is where a hospital wakes you up and you do not know who you are or where you are.

(Sotto): This is where Jim gets lost in his past and I get lost with him. This is where I ask you to help me, Vatchi. This is where he traps me in his past, Surimi.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 78)

A Reflection of Truth

I thought I had stockpiled a limited amount of knowledge of food, wine and the restaurant and bar businesses, but parlayed with my hospitality/advertising experience, I had buffaloed my way into the peachy job of restaurant critic on a four-minute television segment known as “Time to Dine” on WWAC-TV 53’s Friday Night Evening News Broadcast.

My show didn’t even last their full last broadcast season ‘due to budget restrictions', but the unconfirmed possibility exists that my alcoholism was strongly in the picture.

Although it is true that I had had no prior broadcast experience in front of the camera, it is the emotional truth, the alcoholic truth, that I want to get at here....

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 77)

I would finally see the light....

   My advertising career and my bartending career had similarities. Selling the dream. Selling a dream. With advertising, I sold the dream through the print, radio and television ads I created and produced. With bartending, I sold the dream through Johnny Walker, bar snacks and shot glasses. I could sell what I didn't believe in (advertising), but what I did believe in (alcohol), sold me. Our consumer culture did not consume me. It was alcohol, that vulture culture, that picked my bones clean. 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 76)

“The phenomenon of craving”

“The phenomenon of craving” is how Dr. William D. Silkworth separates the alcoholic from the social drinker in “The Doctor’s Opinion” Chapter of A.A.’s basic text, Alcoholics Anonymous.

When I drink, it seems this ‘craving’ is what qualifies me as “depraved”. Guilt, shame, self-pity, and a host of other emotions are all mine when this craving for ‘more’ takes over. Even in a blackout state, my brain seems to crave, no, require, more alcohol than my body can process. ‘More’ until I blackout and ‘more’ until I pass out. ‘More’ until I find the hospital door. Or it finds me.

This ‘craving’, if it were to be described (as society, our culture, and some religious communities do) as a sin, would neatly fit within the “Seven Deadly Sins”. That Sin is Avarice, the ‘craving’ for ‘more’. The Sin of Avarice is its own punishment, hell on earth, as it were, because ‘more’ is never enough.

More is never enough.

Enough.

Move on.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 75)

Inspired Clarity

   When I’ve been confused about my feelings and I’ve been willing to listen,

I have heard through others' voices the feelings that I had somehow been

 blocking from my consciousness, a new clarity.

 Getting better by osmosis: People, places and things turned inside out.

 Batteries recharged.

from All Drinking Aside: The Destruction, Deconstruction and Reconstruction of an Alcoholic Animal (Rough Draft, Chapter 74)

from Chapter 73 (in which I may be struck by lightning)

God strike me dead if I mean any mean to Bette Davis in this apocryphal anecdote:

Bette was seen entering the stall in the Ladies' Room of an exquisite Beverly Hills restaurant. Through the walls of the stall she was heard loudly and drunkenly exclaiming, "Corn? When did I eat corn?"

Hangovers, when I still had them, were like that to me: "I said what? I did what? I went where?" And on and on.

Now sober, I hope the world can now well see that seventy-five percent of my insanity has been contained.

I'm still working on the other half (more corn).

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 73)