Improvisation, Strict Rules and Crossed Fingers

    I'm still digging up clues from thirty, twenty, even fifteen years ago. Excavator alligator.
 
(Surimi): "Dinosaur Bore." Drunk as a Whore. So much of Jim: Drowning, sinking, floating, dying. I don't even know if I'm making this up, but Jim is like that guy in India with the eight-foot tall ball of rubber bands. Interesting, but useless. Trivia. Each day's drunk beating someprevious record. Predictable, yet beyond understanding.
     
   Turning around an ocean liner. This is Jim's life. It will take this: Improvisation, Strict Rules and Crossed Fingers.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 25)

Triple-digit Alcoholic

(Surimi):

Rhythm of the Dance, Gentlemen. That's what early sobriety is like. Almost

everyone has two left feet when they first get sober. A life lived "under the influence" isn't going to be easy to change. Biorhythms, brain rhythms, Rhythms of the Dance, gentlemen.

    Learning to live sober is a whole new dance. Everything is changing, and at different rates of progression. There will be setbacks and missteps.

    Rhythm of the Dance.

    One hundred percent drunk, one hundred percent of the time. That is the goal of my disease. A tsunami of alcohol. A volcano, tornado, hurricane, avalanche, flood. Every and all disasters, natural and unnatural. Not one percent alcoholic. Not ten percent. Triple-digit, one hundred percent alcoholic. Triple-digit. Nothing less than nothingness.

Keep it Simple

   Keeping it simple: Alcohol is a depressant. Sobriety is an anti-depressant. Alcoholism is insanity. Recovery is reality. In addiction, the doors of perception become the doors of deception. All, over-simplifications. All, simply true, mostly true, sometimes true.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 23)

This Chemical Assault

(Sotto):

"Unteachable" self-medicator. Do you hear him, Vatchi? I don't think he would listen to anyone when he picked up his first drink, perhaps before. And all these other drugs he's admittedly taken? They, too, might have been a phase, but I guess it's at least partly true, what I've heard, that the normal physical, mental and social maturity that comes with growing up stops, or at least severely slows down, once the alcohol hits the brain of an alcoholic mind.

   Christ, now he has me making excuses for him in my head.

    Anxiety, let it pass. Anger, let it go. Fear, unclench it.

    This chemical assault is over.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 22)

A Solution

(Surimi): Films. Lectures. Discussions. Recovery classes. All these things have a subtle and cumulative effect. The addict and alcoholic knows his disease from the inside, but even fear of repeated negative consequences alone couldn't keep Jim sober.
    Breathe in. Breathe out. All I know is that he cannot do this alone. He never could. He never did. He never will. Breathe, Jim. Just breathe.                                            

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 21)


Meditation

    It has taken time to still my mind instead of passing out as I used to do. To glide seamlessly from waking consciousness into a blissful night's sleep, waking up refreshed, alert and drug-free. This did not happen overnight and thankfully, I have enjoyed this slow transition. Two months of Transcendental Meditation could not have done this for me. 'Impetuous youth' and alcohol had not run their courses.

   The subtlety of simple wakefulness, the nuanced ebb and flow of my gentle breathing. This is not "addicted to chaos". This simple act of merely letting go took time after being wound up like a toy soldier, alcohol as fuel.

   Toy soldier, letting loose. Sober someone, letting go.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 20)



The Meaning of Meaning

Evening Meditation:

   Once upon a time there was work and there was play and they seemed opposite. But as my alcoholism progressed, playing wasn’t fun anymore as drinking became my necessity. Alcohol turned all my would-be fun into clinical depression. Synonym and antonym became the same insane, like loosen and unloosen. Who knew fun could be so wearisome?

   The meanings of words changed meaning until nothing meant anything.

Quote? "The opposite of fun, for me, is alcohol."

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 19)




The Distance of Disease: Day 18 concludes

    The distances between planets seem so far until I consider the distances between stars. The distances between people, then, really aren't all that far at all. The distances of addiction and delusion? Too close. Too far.

Evening Meditation:

   An accumulating mountain of evidence did not slow my descent. There were no intersections, no neural connections, no one plus one equals two. Ever-increasing orders of magnitude: Crash, then burn.

“Anticipate the good so that you may enjoy it.”

Ethiopian Proverb

                                                              Question for Today:
   What did addiction borrow? What did addiction steal? What did you give so freely? What does the truth reveal?





Cumulative Effect

(Surimi): Jim's body built up a tolerance for alcohol (not to mention his mind, his heart, his soul). It would take more and more alcohol to achieve the same effect. Except it never really was the same effect as his tolerance increased. It had "cunning, baffling and powerful" similarities to the "same" effect, but the cumulative effect was another story.


    Only slowly did he learn that as he began to look more and more like an alcoholic to observers he did not feel the difference he wanted on the inside. "More" trumped effect and in a very long blink, he was consumed by his disease.

    Now, Sotto and Vatchi, your understanding of him will change as he changes. The metamorphosis of change and the metamorphosis of the understanding of change.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 17)

Day 16 Opens....

“To live is to suffer. To survive is to find meaning in suffering.”

Viktor Frankl

Morning Meditation:

So, I asked myself, “What is larger than me that I might want to be a part of?” Hmmm…. The human race might be a nice start.

What is hollow? A hollow heart? A chocolate Easter bunny? A hollow point bullet? A hollow point bullet. Let’s start there....

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 16)

Change

　　 “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

Morning Meditation:
　　 “Live Free or Die”: State of New Hampshire or State of Recovery?
    I must be getting pretty damned old. It occurred to me today that I could GPS (Global Positioning System) almost any intersection in Atlantic City, and like a Chinese menu (pick one from column A, one from column B and one from Column C), I could select any of a variety of memories. Just one example: The intersection of Indiana and Pacific Avenues. It was the site of the Midtown-Bala Hotel's Chip's Restaurant and　Bar　where I worked for years, on and off, as a waiter and a bartender. Sands Casino which had been adjacent later bought the property and it became part of their then new front entrance. The Sands Casino was then imploded to make way for a new casino. That entire square block now sits leveled and vacant.
   Selective memories, indeed. For the longest time, everything changed except me.

　
from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 15)

From Cradle to Grave

　　 The loneliness of an alcoholic death. That's what many of my recollections bring me down to. Is it too early to be this honest? Reciprocity is keeping me sober. Sharing with another alcoholic. It really is that simple. I used to drown the loneliness caused by alcohol with (what else?) more alcohol. Solitude seemed an impossibility when a bottle of booze sat next to me. Alcohol lorded over me and made solitude an impossibility. Loneliness, inescapable. Solitude, unattainable. Sobriety, unimaginable.

That was then and now my life is changing.   from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 14)　


My Kryptonite

I could not suspect or know that I would diverge from all the social drinkers in the world about me in my early years of drinking. By the time my Kryptonite, Alcohol, had taken hold, my long, slow death spiral had already begun. Suspicion, divergence, insanity, brick wall. "Pride goeth before the fall." This I did not know. I drank that knowledge away.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 13)

The Pope Mobile?

   After eight years, Jane had seen my slow descent from the outside. She'd seen me as her sober bartender at Seven South Bar. She'd seen me relapse. It was Jane who'd helped me go to the Mainland Hospital when I'd crashed to another bottom during my second stay at the Brunswick Hotel.

　
   It was Jane who'd offered me a place to live in after Seven South unexpectedly closed and I was fired from Dunkin' Donuts for showing up drunk at the end of a binge, still disturbingly drunk after being passed out for twelve solid hours.　　

　　

   "Where are the bullets?" Bob keeps asking me again and again. He only ever really asked me once. Maybe twice. But in my mind, my memory I hear “Where are the bullets?" over and over and over again with a knife at my throat. I don't know where he got them, three days out of jail after a multiple year stint. He was drunk. I was drunk. He passed out. I took the box of bullets to the next door neighbors at two or three in the morning and had the neighbors call the police.　　　

   Cop-killer bullets, next door. Suicide attempt, next room. Ambulance on the way, cops on their way.

　
   "Where are the bullets?"

　

   Click. Make me three days drunk in Atlantic City after all this. After all this. Click me sober, click me drunk. Bob plea-bargained himself into Ancorra Mental Hospital. Two months later, for whatever reason, he sought me out at the Mays Landing Diner upon his release from the hospital. He said he was there to ask my forgiveness and to take me out for a drink after work. I told him to come back in two hours when my shift ended. Scared, I ran to Atlanatic City for another three day drunk.
　

 

   I will leave that behind me now. My sobriety is not bullet-proof. Sobriety is not the Pope mobile.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 12)

Hope in a Bottle

　　 Somehow it seems that every generation is a “Lost Generation” when I think about it. Not just F. Scott Fitzgerald and the rest of that generation. On a personal level, my generation’s feelings of being lost resulted in finding hope in drugs and a bottle (at least the kids I hung out with). But, Boy, for an alcoholic like me, there was no putting the genii back in the bottle.
(Sotto): Get ready, Vatchi, here it comes. He’s cast out the fishing line. He’s trying to reel us in, slowly, slowly. Come on, Jim (he’s almost got us now). Slowly…. Vatchi, have you got your hip boots on?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 11)




The Pub

The irony of a poem I wrote called "The Pub" is that I was tripping on LSD when I wrote it in my junior year of college. I swallowed quite a bit of acid and other pills in the late 60's and early 70's, but it was eventually alcohol that swallowed me. I include just one small segment here:

“The Pub”

In its tables waxed and burnt with cigarette marks, in its peanut shells and its glasses, endless piles of glasses, in its cold-eyed stares and the smell of stale beer, in its wine, in its whisky and in its smell of people cramped into a crowd of loneliness, I see life struggling to come to terms with itself.

In the laughter and the sadness of the pub and in the people’s faces I see a dizzy happiness reeling away and toppling over in the morning and I see the hope that morning will not come and I see the fear that each man’s suffering will be felt and I see that the suffering is felt but cannot be reckoned with....
And I see that I drink my beer in silence and however occasional smiles.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 10)

"Tally Ho!"

"Everything you own, owns a part of you."Gracie Allen

Morning Meditation:

When I hit bottom, I accepted the pain of loss, but not the loss itself. My beautiful, beautiful alcohol had died.

Goodness gracious. How far I have traveled from my humble, drunken, drug-infused youth. From fifteen cent soda fountain cherry cokes after school at Prosser's Drug Store, a block from my high school in Hellertown, a bedroom community predominated by Bethlehem Steel Corporation employee families, I moved on to the college life expected of me. I can remember the first few bars which I entered, easily served yet underage, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, home to my college, Moravian College and home to Lehigh University. The Tally Ho Tavern was a college bar and underage drinking was far from uncommon. Back then, in the late 1960’s, through the '70's and presumably still today.

(Sotto): Oh, god, save me from this! What's next? About his BA in English. Hey, Vatchi, know what the BA stands for? Boring Asshole. Christ, I hope this is just some cul-de-sac that he has entered and not another endless "Jim" story.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 9)



"The Fifteenth Stone"

[note: not these stones, but I do like this photo!]

(Vatchi): Sotto, you just reminded me here of something I thought long forgotten. It's called "The Fifteenth Stone" and I can't recall if it's a true story or an allegory, or what. But let me explain of stones and elephants.

   Somewhere, Japan or China , who knows? San Francisco ? A garden exists somewhere, a rock garden, let's say the size of a tennis court. You can walk completely around it, but you are not allowed to cross its borders. This rock garden contains fifteen large stones of varying sizes, say, knee high to chest high. And this rock garden is so constructed that no matter where you stand on the garden's perimeter, only fourteen of the stones are ever visible. One stone, forever changing, is always hidden from view. Fifteen stones in the garden, and no matter where you stand, only fourteen are visible.

   Which stone is Jim, Sotto? Which stone are you, Surimi?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 8)

The Beginning of Empathy

Now, when I cry for others, why do they feel like the tears that I should have had, but never did, never did shed for myself? Is empathy a rear view mirror? A way to not cry out alone? A backlog, a log jam of tears.

Why am I now bleeding where once I should have scarred? Why are the tremors I am now feeling the sober echoes of my unfelt, drunken, painful past?

Fucking emotions in the bottleneck, years and years and years later.

Addiction feeds itself on me and I have been consumed.

I am bleeding now where I didn't bleed then. What goes around comes around again within my brain, the grooves in my brain gone 'round in a loop. Empathy teaches now what was always around me then.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 7)

The Drink that is not here....

    Where can I find gratitude? I will have to create it, invent it. Please help me to not pick up this drink. This drink that is not here. This drink that is in my head. An empty glass before me. Not drinking is dying and drinking is death.

    Where can I find gratitude? Help me invent it, create it, discover it. I do not want this drink. If you help me not find this drink that is not here, I will be grateful. Thank you for helping me not find this drink.

    That is not here.

    I want.

(Surimi):

Life moves towards warmth and away from pain. Until the Medicine Man comes a knockin'. High on attention. High on medication.

Pain aversion. Spiritual disconnect. No exit....

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 6)

Edginess

　　 When I knew the payoff would be big enough, a total wipe-out, a plastered drunkenness for the record books, I could savor that edge of my edginess. My next drink would be spectacular, back then, when I could look forward to my next drink with joyful anticipation. Blow your brains out spectacular. That dark tunnel of blackout drunkenness, familiar, yet cannily unknown.

 　

　　 The sweating would stop soon. I wondered if John and Charlie sensed my fear, my eagerness, my edginess and the complexity of my emotions as we neared Fort Dix. Charlie's house, a dilapidated mansion in the country. Soon. Not yet. Calm down.

　　 We turned right into Charlie’s driveway and for once, it seems that the blackout preceded that first drink. WTF (and I don't mean, "Well, That's Fine")?

　　 John and Charlie called that weekend the "Daffodil Festival" and I only know that because that is what I was told. So much of my life was what others later told me it was. It was this and it was that and it was the other thing. My life was as I was told it was.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 5)




Harmony

(Surimi): .... What looks like acting out is still the drink talking. Sober, yet the ghost of a drink still speaks. The blood has dried. His bruises gone. This ghost has bones, Sotto. His disease is alive, Vatchi. He is quite ill. He has poor judgment or no judgment at all.                 Alcohol is unjust, self-justifying. Finding harmony after so many years of addictive discord makes me think his chances are slim. 'Bleak' and 'Optimistic' seek some common ground, balance. His road ahead seems incongruous, an impossible nightmare to the alternate universe of his addictions.
   I did not choose to be an alcoholic, nor was I chosen. What I once thought was a curse has turned out to be a blessing (so long as I don't pick up). I am discovering unblazed trails of sanity in my recovery (sounds nuts, doesn't it?). Unblazed trails of sanity? No wonder I can't drink.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 4)

　




Morphing

　　

　　 This memory is trivial. This message is sidetracked. This memory is traumatic. This memory is morphing. This memory is morphine. This memory is Librium. This memory is liberation. This memory is prison. This memory is prism. This memory is schism.

　

　　 Ego is a place from which to dive.

　

　　 Ego is a place in which to hide.

　

　　 This memory is morphing.

　

　　 This memory is morphine.

　

　　 This memory is more, fiend. More.

　　 Shallow, hollow, yellow, dying, dead.

　

(Surimi):　

The Mona Lisa, except this time, not the painting. The Mona Lisa, except this time, not a photograph. This time the Mona Lisa, a three-second motion picture of Alcoholism's promises to Jim. Promises, expectations, and then the abortion. Mona Lisa's abortion: Alcoholism's smile.

　

   Jim could not become father to himself.

   Mona Lisa.

   Three seconds.

   Abort.

  from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 3)

For Whom the Landmark Tolls....

　　 I was a blackout drinker and eventually blacked out almost every night, far more often than not. This is not normal, but it became　normal for me, gradually, over the course of over a decade, I guess. I accepted blackouts as a given. Each small change brought on by my increasing dependence on alcohol became part of the new and accepted fabric of my life.

　　 One time, I woke up in the shadow of Independence Hall, the Philadelphia landmark, not remembering who I had been with or how I got there. Another total blackout yet not a wake up call? How could that have been?

　

　　 But it was alright. Somehow I would be alright. It'll be alright. I lied to myself, to others. I bent the truth. I somehow got to work in Atlantic City only (only, what a dangerous word)　three hours late. Somehow it would work out. Somehow I would be alright. Somehow, a drink would make all this bearable again. Plow through the consequences to that drink at the end of the tunnel.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 20)

Unintended Consequences

　　 And that does seem to be the plain, unvarnished truth. I no longer think of myself as a lousy Sponsor. Rather, alcoholism is just a lousy disease, with an incredibly high relapse rate. I should know. I am the "Relapse King" and the "Self-Justification King". And the "King of Blackouts". Check. And Check-Mate.　

(Sotto): Vatchi, this one incident alone, Jim buying Aaron the cell phone, and the serious consequences and their ripple effects. Kind of proves that old maxim, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
 
(Vatchi): Yes, good intentions and unintended consequences....


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 1)