Time Line

Workaholic/Alcoholic. Alcoholism became my full-time job. Putting together a time line, going from the primordial ooze to the caveman to homo erectus, as seen in all those cartoons and parodies, became painful to me in my early recovery. Between years of blackouts and job changes and being thrown out of apartments and one-night stands and lost loves and firings and on and on: no time-line was remotely possible for me.

But I did the best I could. And it was a tool that helped me stay sober for just one more day. Just one more day sober. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I was capable of. That’s all I could do. And I could not do it alone. Alone, to me, at one point meant only
one thing: alone with a bottle.

It is so easy for me to become estranged from my past. After all, the person I had become could never be my friend today. I would find him intolerable.

As manipulative and conniving and wanting as I was in my drunkenness then, surrounded by enablers (blame them, Jim, blame them), today I would not, could not be fooled. Today.

Half ditty, half prayer: I do not want to go back there.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 65)