"Didn't You Used to Be Somebody?"

    I went from being intoxicated to being toxic. Hatred of that place in me stops me here. I believe I need to cry.

      Now.

    Stop.

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.

   Repeat. Repeated. Repeat.  
    "I find that the harder I work the more luck I seem to have."



                                                                                                          Thomas Jefferson

Question for Today:

   Why are delusions so sadly less than infinite?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 28)

　



"(Expletive Deleted) You, Gentle Reader"

(Vatchi): I really wish that Jim would not curse. In the end, it is really so inexpressive. Curse words are like hiccups. Unnecessary interruptions. Have you noticed, Sotto, that when Jim curses, it shows which emotions he does not yet have a handle on?
 
    He either curses, stops, or changes subjects when he hits an emotional roadblock.

   At least his sober insanity is a little more predictable than the insanity of his alcoholism.
   A dope with hope. That's Jim.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 27)



"Pompeii in Motion"

    Losing things because of my drinking and then drinking more to get over the loss. Then drinking to forget drinking over those losses. I wallowed in the pain, then. Am I wallowing in the memory of the pain, now?

   The last time I was in Philadelphia's train station I was plastered almost beyond recognition. But then, unexpectedly, I was recognized by Trent, who spotted me in my complete and utter drunken state and instantly fled as if leaving the scene of an accident. When I'm drinking I seem to only know how low I've sunk through the observations of others' words or looks. My disease blinds me to the progression of my own disease. The drunken language of my disease constructs a progressively inelegant Tower of Babel. Even a rat would tire of the alcoholic maze and haze in which I lived.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 26)



"Obviously Obliterated"

    Alcohol became my life, took over my life. It is not fear of my past or fears from my past that have slowed the pace of my recovery here. This is a quiet pace. My past unravels as my future unfurls. That's about as well as I can express it. I am at a time of patience, a rest stop. Neural connections reorganizing. Irrational desires supplanted by rational hopes.

    I cannot rush past my recovery. My recovery is today.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 25)

"Triple-Digit Drunk"

    "A mind stretched by a new idea never shrinks back to its original dimensions."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Morning Meditation:

    At some point, I reached the point where using only served the purpose of postponing withdrawal. Is that what pointless means?

    Breathing with my head turned sideways on the exhale, only breathing inward when I faced someone directly. I had to try different kinds of breathing exercises after my usual heavy nights of drinking. I no longer got hangovers, but hoped to be the Zen master of deceit, bad breath-wise. Turn head. Exhale. Face person again, inhaling only. Speak. Get a concerned look on my face, as if I was listening. No morning meetings. Do not schedule any morning meetings, if possible. Turn head away. Exhale. 

   Who did I think I was kidding?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 24) 



"Fireworks of Darkness within Darkness"

    It is endlessly fascinating how memory works. I can remember very clearly the fear I felt when I got off the bus from Lakeside, after leaving my very first Rehab Hospital.

   Just short of kicking and screaming, I literally begged to not leave the Rehab after the mandatory maximum fourteen day stay. I knew what had always happened to me in the past. I would leave a detox and despite myself, a drink would find its way into my hands that very day. That is all I knew to do when I got out. I knew how to drink, but I did not know how to not drink. All kidding aside, how could I put all drinking aside?

   I was 'sick and tired' of relapse after relapse yet, despite my best intentions, I knew I could not do it alone.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 23)

"The Intelligence of Trees"

   The old sense that children come into this world as blank slates upon which the world will write their story and, in fact, how they will see the world, for me, an alcoholic, became seeing the world not through rose-colored glasses, but through booze-colored bar glasses.

    From utopia to myopia.

    The child within was taken away, my innocence lost in the drink. Adulthood, stunted. thirty years passed. When will I inherit the healer within? Here, finally, traumatic stress and traumatic growth unite.

   This is my sobriety.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 22)

"My Power Grid"

   Whatever power is, that's what addiction steals. I need to repeat that to myself again. The dreams I had are gone. The dreams I have left are held closer to my chest. My old dreams eventually dissolved into the next drink, and the one after that, after that, after that.

    Cold beer in a hot shower. “Time to go to work.” That’s what I’d say to myself, blasé-blasé.

 
(Vatchi): "Addiction steals power." That's a good one. And power is time. Addiction. Benediction. The party's over. But Jim never, ever goes home. He'd rather black out. He'd rather pass out. "I think I died last night." That's what coming to is.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 21)

"Meditate or Medicate?"

Evening Meditation:

    I have proven to myself again and again that 'addicted to chaos' is another form of denial. Sobriety was such a rude, uncomfortable and painful awakening. My addiction wants me to continue down the familiar path of more: a rock, a hard place, trapped. Addicted to chaos? Hardly. Addicted to alcohol? Most assuredly.

    “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.”

Erich Fromm

 

Question for Today:

    Which emotions get left out in the crowd and which get crowded out? Which crowd? Why?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 20)

　

　

　

　

　

　



"Transformers"

    I would walk past Kornblau's Delicatessen one way, not drunk enough to eat and later, return the other way, hours later, too drunk to eat. Did alcohol have something to do with that?

    Is that what you're telling me?

    Alcohol was part of every plan. Does that mean that alcohol was the plan? A bar tan replaced my beach tan. Whose fault was that? You're trying to blame me?

    I brushed my teeth every day. Maybe toothpaste was my problem. I took a shower every day. Maybe showering was my problem.

    When had alcohol suddenly seemed so demanding? Fuck you. Gimme a drink. Gimme a drink. Now.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 19)

"The Distance of Disease"

   All this crap and trying to appear self-assured and having my act together. What may have been obvious to others was not obvious to this drunk. Not at that time. Not then. What else is not so obvious to me now, but someday might? I'll have to get back to you on that.

(Sotto): He doth boast too much in his self-deprecating manner. Actually, I do feel a little sorry for him. Dammit…. He has me playing into his hand, now!
    Self-assurance was my mask. Still is my mask? I could be drunk and still perform. Or so I thought. I'll be all right. I can do this. My drunken high could act with such a mask of self-assurance.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 18)

"Fossilized"

 
   The illusion of escape. The biggest magic trick of all. Ossified, fossilized. Rational eyes, rational lies. Crumbs of whimsy, crumbs of whimsy. I'm done. Fossil-fucked by alcohol.

                     Evening Meditation:
                                                                                           

    Only twice did I ever stand outside a liquor store waiting for it to open, literally sweating those last few minutes before the doors finally opened. Open, damn it! I measured my life in pints instead of hours. Only twice I stood outside waiting. But it could have been (and really was) 10,000 days.

    “Life is too important to be taken seriously.”

Oscar Wilde

 from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 17)



"You are Eve Before the Apple and I am Adam After the Fall"

(Surimi): Facts don't fill an empty heart, Vatchi. That's what I hear, Vatchi. I hear not so much his lack of understanding, Sotto, but his desire to understand more. There's a talent to listening, too, Sotto, and at least I feel that desire in Jim.

 

    He speaks well enough to open my heart, Sotto. Listen well. You might learn lessons from him that even he has yet to learn.

 

    This is the nature of discourse, of inspiration, coincidence and very good unintended consequences.

 

    The good, unintended consequences of sobriety.

 

    Are you listening now, Sotto? Not so much survivor's guilt as his voice as survivor. The knife, the gun, the alcohol as weapon. He shut himself off and now sober he is slowly opening himself up.

 

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 16)

"Everything Changed Except Me"

(Vatchi): [continuing...] Other people's consciousness is such a strange thing to watch, Sotto. And I'm here watching you watch him.

   My job's easier.

 

   Relax. We're only halfway through Act One.

 

    And now, change has surely come as I have moved to another Atlantic City location across the street from another vacant tract of land (no, not my mind!), a site formerly Playboy Casino, then Trump's World Fair Casino and now a rectangular goose egg.  

 

    Looking out over this empty tract of land, I see the emptiness that was me, drunk but empty, when I did advertising work for Playboy. I vividly remember the alcoholic haze which prevented me from meeting with Joanne, the director of advertising, except in the late afternoon. The bigger the account, the later in the day I would schedule that appointment, because I knew I reeked less of alcohol as the day progressed.

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 15)

"The Unseen Bar Scene Seen"

   I romanticized my disease when I was drinking until the reality got so bad that the romance had to die, with me following on its coattails. At each step in my slow, downward progression I would tell myself that it couldn't get any worse and that however bad I was, it wasn't anything that another drink couldn't fix. But it did and could and would always get worse. Never would I think to stop drinking. Attempts to modify my drinking to a more reasonable amount of consumption failed on a nightly basis. My resolve dissolved. My Drinking Man's Guide to Bar Exercise lost all momentum on the stillness of my barstool.


from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 14)

"The Hallucinated Self"

   ... To the left, inside the entranceway, I saw the kitchen with the refrigerator and sink, and to the far right, the open bedroom door. Between where I stood and the bedroom was the door to the bathroom.

 

    Two steps inside the apartment door allowed me to hear the water from the bathroom sink run down the drain from the cold-water faucet, barely more than a drip. It ran over the broken green bottle of Aqua di Silva cologne. The broken green glass made me think that Ted had cut himself, but there was no sign of blood anywhere. I heard what I at first thought was a distant voice shout, “Ted” and I turned around to discover that that had been my voice. Part of me stood separated from that moment. My own voice had startled me.

 

    I heard my feet racing down the steps to the street. My right hand had automatically turned off the cold-water faucet. My voice trailed behind me. Fear separated, fear dissected. "Ted" was now an echo in my head. Fear controlled....

 

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 13)

"Click Me Sober, Click Me Drunk"

 (Surimi): These are nerve endings. Jim's nerve endings. Short-circuited synapses in his brain. And now, in sobriety, years of his stuffed emotions are surely and slowly unraveling, unraveling.

   He can survive this. He must survive this. Or? Or he will pick up a drink. Adapt or die.

   Dysfunctional life, malfunctioning brain. Dismal and dying. Ten thousand days of dying. People, places and things. Fifty thousand drinks are gone and today is today is today.

    He seems to know that he cannot do this alone. Not this time. Not ever.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 12)

"Birth. Insanity. Recovery or Death."

    Now sober, I can't blame my alcoholism on any particular set of events or circumstances. Events fueled the quantity and frequency of my alcohol intake, but were not the cause. Fuck the cause. Alcohol was in my head regardless. In a perfect world, I am still an alcoholic.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 11)

 



"The Language of Addiction"

(Surimi):  Learning Spanish easily. Learning the Language of Denial, easily. Denial sells its wares to each alcoholic at the cellular level and at the level of the intelligence of its victim, a chess match. "Know your consumer" is the hallmark of any good salesman, and Denial is the King of Consumer Knowledge.

    The alcoholic brain barely stands a chance.

    Terminal disease.      Train wreck ahead.

    All aboard who's coming aboard. The drinks are free. 
from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 10)



"Packing Peanuts"

(Surimi): Oh, Vatchi, please. Jim must let go. I know the past still has him in its grip and he must not allow himself to forget it. But he cannot let it haunt him. His blackouts. And Sotto, my message to Jim is silence. A kind silence, Vatchi. Let go and let reality fill the crevasses left behind by blackouts.

    The teeth chatter, the mind chatter: Let it go. Let silence enter. A resilient silence.

    It's my ego that clings to my past, I guess. Even the bad stuff. Can I cobble together some kind of self-image? My Scrapbook is a Crap Book. Like two hundred and fifty TV channels and nothing worth watching. That's my past: No news is my news. Ego. And nowhere to go. Too much self and not enough help. Chaos.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 9)



"An Alcoholic Is."

Evening Meditation:

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 ever 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.

"Nothing happens unless first we dream."

Carl Sandburg

Question for Today:

Which seeds, when lost, may still bear fruit?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 8)




"The Bottleneck"

(Surimi): [continuing... ] Sotto, Vatchi. Jim is bleeding as he heals. His new pain, the new pain formed from this cleansing of the old.
 
Where did responsible and irresponsible intersect? How am I not so innocent a bystander of this train wreck? 
 
(Sotto): Surimi, I am caught up in this.


Padded rooms, padded lies.
 
(Vatchi): Sotto, sympathy can become empathy.

God damned frog on this pad, pad, padded lily pad.  
(Surimi): "More will be revealed."

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 7)



"Flying Rats"

 (Vatchi): No, Sotto, you are not "connecting dots left better unconnected." If I may extrapolate your thought, I'm getting a picture of the method to Jim's madness, a madness he does not fully know and a method he is still discovering.

   Your thoughts leave me with an impression, an analogy of sorts. The facts of Jim's life are like a bag of bones, disconnected. Some facts, naturally, are more important than others. His emotions seem to be almost like the muscles by which he's trying to pull this skeleton back together. What a scattered mess when the centrifuge stops spinning.

   Sotto, I really don't know. He seems to be trying and rambles haltingly. Give him a chance. Let us give him a chance. Let's just step back and listen, for now.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 6)



"Maintenance Drinking"

(Vatchi): {Continuing}... Sotto, to this day, I don't think Jim knows that he was plummeting towards his bottom for years before hitting it.

    How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?

   I've got a little sippy cup with a flippy little lid. I'll fill it to the brimmy brim, not half empty, not half full. Hopscotch. Butterscotch. All scotch, scotch. Down the drain, scotch is rain. Sippy cup, flippy cup, bar of soap, dope.

    How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 5)


Day 4: "Disease Management 101"

(Vatchi): Sotto, I'm only guessing, but could Jim's past have been actually far worse than he is sharing in his sobriety? I think he stretches the truth but also may be ignoring or lying or burying memories from his early childhood. What is the truth here? Where is the truth? Must it not always be more than it appears?

    Sometimes, a baby is scared by his own crying, unable, it seems, to recognize the source of the noise as his own. This can make him cry even louder and more fearfully and worse. Until a mother's arms and gentle whispers change the tide. Then sleep.

    Was my life, and my relationship to my alcohol really that much different? Crying out, the bottle would comfort me, protect me. "It's the bottle talking" was the truth and an excuse and a lie.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 4)

Day 3: "Color Me Empty"

  

(Sotto): He is an eternal distraction. He’s not fooling me for a second, Vatchi. Behind what he is saying, I think he’s still reaching for a drink. The way he hesitates. Between sentences. Between words. Maybe he doesn't know what else to reach for, Vatchi. I could be wrong, but I think he wants a drink right now. But I'm not wrong about this, Vatchi. Jim irritates me, with a capital 'I'.

    There was nothing, it seemed, that a drink couldn't fix. The alcohol numbed other options. Options became secondary to the clink of ice in a glass. Life was a pain I could not feel. My denial was a pain that was not felt. Alcohol numbed that.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 3)

from Day 2: "Psycho Analysis"

(Surimi): Escape of self, escape from self, the illusion of self. Under the illusion of transcending reality, Jim's disease has taken him full circle. Trying to break his delusional alcoholic cycles, Jim now seeks a more humane, human journey.

Romeo and Juliet. Jim and Alcohol. His sense of self, seemingly diminished without the drink, is still attracted to alcohol. Wings broken by alcohol still crave flight. He cannot be free when alcohol is within him.

The allure of destruction and hope for recovery, like the Phoenix. Spread wings tempt flight. Sotto, Vatchi. Hear Jim out. Sober.

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 2)



from Day 1: "Alcohol is Power"

   (Surimi): Jim is clever, deceptive, annoying, disturbed. Sotto, Vatchi, be careful with what you think you see and hear. Jim has constructed and destructed mirrors everywhere and they may not be mirrors of himself. And should he hold up a mirror to show you your reflection he may deceive you. He may wish to make his thoughts seem that they are yours. You are both rubbernecking the train wreck of Jim's life, rubbernecking. He will survive this or he will die from this. Here his story ends and here, too, his story begins.     from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Day 1)