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)