Prescription: Recovery

Right before my last relapse, after having just gotten out of the hospital for an operation for stomach hernias, I played Doctor with my prescribed pain medications. I took more than the prescribed dosage because I wanted quick relief. I was in pain. Then I didn’t wait long enough for the next prescribed dosage time. Before you know it, I was immobile on the sidewalk, crazed and an ambulance was summoned by a passing stranger (apparently)) and back to the hospital I went, having been just released a few short hours earlier.

If it takes eight pills to kill you, I would feel safe taking six, and then two hours later I might start wondering if it would be safe to take another one or two. Never was it a case of wanting to commit suicide. I just wanted to get as high as safely possible.

After the first drink, there is no other.

(Sotto): Vatchi? He still sounds a little like he wants to be somewhere where he’s not. Not a lion seeking his prey, or a vegetarian stalking wild asparagus. Ha! That’s a good one! I think he’s still looking to get high. Or at least romanticizing his phantoms.

I know I can never drink again. Countless times, after varying amounts and degrees of sobriety, I have tried. The alcoholic insanity always comes back and always takes over, whether after one drink or twenty.

Smoking marijuana, perhaps, when it finally becomes legal? I really don't know. I just fear that other drugs might retrigger my alcoholism. I don't think I can do any drug 'socially' now.

"Just for Today," as I've heard in Narcotics Anonymous, "just for today, I will not pick up."

Being so level-headed no longer gives me a sense of self-contempt as it once did, early on in my sobriety. Staying sober makes living sober and being sober, not only tolerable, but desirable.

It had taken me nearly sixty years to say "I'm okay," and mean it and know what that means. That might never have happened were I not an alcoholic. Who knows? All I know is... I'm okay, "Just for Today."

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 41)

Denial

There was a time when I was not there, but I did not know it yet. I would drink to forget, forgetting what I did not know. Not yet. I did not know yet. Where was I then, when I was not there?

For years I lived somewhere between myself and the next drink. I would drink to forget what I could not think, halfway to nowhere and another drink. I was grieving and I did not know it. Someone was dying, but I could not feel it, feel my own dying. I could not own it because it owned me.

Denial is so hard to feel, yet, there it is, standing next to you. You: Halfway to nowhere and another drink.

(Sotto): He seems in equal part to have been in denial about how much he hurt people when he was drinking as he is in denial about how much he needs people to help him to remain sober in his recovery

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 40)



Analogies for Addiction

Alcohol is my poison, my prison. A brick wall, a trap door, a cancer, a bad joke, an empty bottle, an excuse, a leaky faucet, a loan shark, a broken promise, a cracked mirror, an earthquake, an avalanche, a train wreck, a recurring nightmare.

Alcohol is my insanity.

(Sotto): Oh, my goodness. I should have seen this shit coming. Ramble, ramble, ramble. Ramble, ramble, ramble. But I’ve got to admit it. Some of what he says is at least half-true.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 39)

The Friars Club (for example):

Having survived this long, I think of myself as a man becoming old, whereas to those around me, I am already old. Quite rightly, perhaps, I feel like Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea, or, more properly, the old fisherman portrayed by Tracy in the Hemingway novel. Except, instead of the struggle with the fish, my struggle has been with my addiction: A world where so much has been forgotten, because so much was not remembered in the first place.

Here’s a perfect example: My older friends (at the time), Lenny and Don, took me on a trip to New York City to have dinner at the famous Friars Club and to meet Jackie Mason, his career undergoing a huge resurgence. The thousand and one memories I should have had about this trip, the amusing anecdotes and charming witticisms that would have entertained whomever would listen, are now in the dustbin of history, like so many whale carcasses upon a beach whose name I no longer remember.

Alcohol.

Whale carcasses. Bones picked clean. Toy soldiers. Dead soldiers. Same thing.

I have surrendered and whatever there is now left, I will savor.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 38)

The Illusion of "the same, old high":

(Surimi): More alcohol was needed to give the illusion of the same high. But it was not the same high. Could not be the same high. Addiction takes what is lost out of the equation to give the appearance, the trompe d'oeuil of sameness.

But it is never the same high that is achieved because the highway of more becomes littered with loss.

The equation does not factor in loss because the equation is owned by the addiction and not by the dispossessed.

Comfort should be for the dying, yet, there is, in the end, no comfort in this.

Oblivion is not comfort.

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 37)



The Aftermath

(Surimi): Jim is incomplete now because his life was incomplete then. His blackouts were the rude punctuation marks of a diseased brain. 

And not just alcohol. The chemicals, known and unknown, in Angel Dust, marijuana, and a host of others.

The best prisoner is he who does not know that he is imprisoned. The door is closed but is not locked because no key is ever sought.

"Drink me and everything will be alright," whispers the auditory hallucination. 

Blind loneliness as the final result.

Stop. 

He stopped.

Now what? What next? Where?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 36)

How Chapter 35 ends....

Brought to my knees once again, A defeat in my present. A leftover from my chemically defeated past. I cannot let my past succeed in defeating me again.

My leftover, hung-over, sideshow, freak show is the language of self-destruction and alcoholic destruction, pure insanity, purely insane, insane, pure.

Help.

Help me. Someone help me. Someone help me help someone. Help someone. Someone help.

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.

“When things go wrong, don't go with them.” - Anonymous

 

Can and should the healing ever be complete?

 

from All Drinking Aside (Rough Draft, Chapter 35)