Five years well hosed off, if not precisely clean
As much as I dislike admitting it, quitting drinking for good* is probably the most unlikely thing I have ever achieved
The date is November 22, 2021. Fifty-eight years ago today, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, making him the fourth and most recent American commander-in-chief to be murdered.
According to my Vivoactive watch, I averaged 104 minutes a day of running last week (ending yesterday). If I averaged eight minutes per mile, which I am at least 75 percent confident I did, I topped 90 miles. Even if I didn’t, this was my most prolific week since sometime in early 2008. It was a significant bump from the 65 to 70 miles I averaged in the preceding four weeks, that period itself representing a considerable jump from the steady 35- to 45-ish weekly miles I’d maintained for the better part of three competitively dormant years.
I’m tired, but in a familiar sort of way. At this level of sheer output, the running I’m doing has to feel like, and qualify as, “training,” even if it’s only more of the same never-quite-jogging, never-quite-working-hard shufflestorm as before. I will be cutting back this week, hopefully before externalities compel this reduction. But after this binge, I feel connected to a part of myself that I wasn’t sure was still there and, while volatile, has been responsible for powering a lot of useful and satisfying endeavors in the past.
I prefer to not time most of my runs directly, in large part because, at least until recent weeks, Rosie was with me for almost all of my runs, and these include three or four stops even after her initial offloading of bio-ballast. Now that I am tra…running more, I’ve been leaving her behind for most of my second daily runs.
I didn’t plan this, although I did mention over a week ago that I was riding along on my own dishrag version of spiritual momentum after my trip to New Hampshire; this perambulation-bender became the result.
The date is November 22, 2021. Five years ago today, I drank my last sip of alcohol, preceded by many other sips that day and in the preceding weeks and months. Until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t thought about this “anniversary” for a few weeks, but despite the big mileage week being completely unrelated, it’s worth stopping to appreciate how fundamentally healthy someone needs to be to even walk a dozen miles a day, and how absurdly far from healthy I was when I was on my last extended tear.
I spent the previous twenty or so years before the fall of 2016 in an endless, sinusoidal cycle of scuttling the basics of my life and patching them back together, at times even showing hints of unmistakable ambition, only to wreck whatever I had managed to rebuild in three or four sober months in a matter of days, sometimes less. Nothing about my progression was remarkable from a probability standpoint. I became increasingly unreliable, wound up in emergency rooms, started passing out in public places, and landed in the local detox—and occasionally the jail next door—with increasing and unlikely regularity. It almost became more unusual than not to awaken both knowing for the most part how I had gotten to wherever I was and having not pissed my pants while unconscious.
In a lot of ways, this pattern—instead of the boy who cried wolf, the drunk who cried sober, often really meaning it—was worse for people close to me to watch than had I been among those who simply drank himself to death starting early in adulthood with no real pretense at ever stopping besides mumbled, rancid promises (and I made a lot of those, too). Because this pattern gave people hope they eventually fatigued of having, especially after I actively started avoiding them and their dogged attempts to intervene.
I am tempted to review the specific horrors of my worst episodes, and especially the last profoundly lonely five months or so of my drinking, alternately spent between hotels and hospitals. That would take a lot of writing even if I stripped out discretionary drama and needless details. It would be gross, too exquisitely human in all its sordid splendor for a Monday morning. A few examples: I almost froze to death one night trying to hide from a snowstorm in the elevator of a parking garage. That was my version of wintertime fun, and within a week it had been displaced by other events in the recklessness cycle. Later, having laid waste to a naturally very hardy immune system with abuses that saw my blood-alcohol level climb as high as 0.54—and that was when I was somehow awake—I almost died of cellulitis in September 2016 when a doctor at Boulder Community Hospital, who recognized me as no more than a serial drunk on a day I walked in sober with telltale lines creeping up my arm, insisted I was imagining things; I came back later and was admitted by a wise nurse practitioner, getting over a day’s worth of IV antibiotics.
I repeatedly put myself in a position to be organically disregarded, be seen as walking, talking compost by people who couldn’t hide their disdain of me and my relentless stink of moribund failure even if they cared to, and even if it was part of their job to at least try.
Instead of writing that book, I’ll just note a couple of factors related to a concept I’ve already mentioned, probability. These are certainty and luck, which are complementary in practice even if the outcomes they govern seem opposed.
I had to fall a long way to get to my bottom. Most of the struggling people I met during my extended tumble never had the things I did: A stable upbringing with loving parents, an education, a stint as an Army reserve officer, and most of all experience with being respected and treated as a complete person. When I had finally had enough, and agreed to live for a spell in a weird, remote part of the state in something like a sober living house, I still had contacts in the freelance world, the know-how to collect more, and skills I could put to vocational use remotely. That all provided a foundation for me to quickly amass the things that make it easier to maintain stability and feel a comforting level of human dignity.
I didn’t ask to be decent enough at writing passable copy about practically anything and tutoring people in a variety of math subjects to have those money-making, time-filling options available once my head cleared. I am just lucky to have the natural abilities I have, coupled to some amount of innate persistence.
I have seen at least a dozen people I could count as friends die of the consequences of addiction in the time I have been sober from alcohol, and almost all of them never really stood much of a chance. Many of them sobered up into homelessness or lodgings that were basically flophouses, and returned to the only source of comfort, however brutal its costs, that they had ever really known. Most people have never seen real hopelessness until they have seen the face of someone who has absolutely no idea why anyone could possibly be rooting for their lives to get better. No fucking idea.
This one hurt the most. Richie was with me on the night of November 22, 2016. He made sure I wound up safe after I fell into a half-frozen puddle and banged my head. If you look closely, I have a lot of scars from falls like that. I only saw Richie a few more times before he died. He was never sober, but he was always trying to force himself back into some rickety version of pride-driven normalcy. Richie died as much from toxic regret as from the ravages of alcohol, and that was something I could never help him with. I mean, look who’s talking.
I think about these things a lot, and it takes me in a host of directions. It probably contributes to my low tolerance of optional or exaggerated miseries, including my own bitching.
In any case, I know for an absolute fact what will happen if I start drinking again. And in fact, almost all of the conditions are, by traditional psychological metrics, ripe for that to occur. I spend a great deal of time immersed in unpleasant thoughts about myself and the world. And as someone who naturally practices excessive social isolation at baseline, the restrictions and other bullshit associated with COVID-19 hasn’t helped. (I shudder when considering how things would have turned out for me had I still been drinking when a pandemic struck.)
I happened to sober up for good between the election of Donald Trump and the time he assumed office, and since then I have watched the corporate media fall from “merely” biased and unreliable into a state of unpretentious, intentional ruin. I bought into a great deal of bullshit early on, some it still infecting my thinking like radioactive brain-dingleberries. I have seen a lot of people I counted as friends and allies fall into the grip of a hysterical, counterfactual, cancel-happy religious movement poorly disguised as a collective push for social progress, eagerly adopting the same rhetorical tactics they accurately accused Trump and his allies of using. I used to like following current events for their own sake and respected the tough work reporters did. The American educational system, another institution I like hold in high regard, is also now being relentlessly ass-reamed by implacable idiots. Now, I avoid the news like I avoid, well, booze, and for some of the same reasons. And so on.
The truth is, I have as much or as little to complain about as I choose, really, when I strip out the static that doesn’t really matter that much. But the point I am getting around to is that I live alone, have a decent amount of money saved, and could plausibly embark on a drunken bender without anyone noticing for a day or two. But I comprehend with utter certainty what the result of that would be, aside from specific details. For one thing, I would quickly find out that my days are busier than I realize they are, and that I was behind on texts and e-mails and trying to concoct bleary, frantic excuses. More urgently, I would be unable to care for Rosie. And despite having a place to hide out, behind locked doors and under a roof I can call mine, I would quickly embark on some act of public fuckery and wind up in custody or the detox, and it’s a toss-up as to which of those would be worse. The guilt and sense of loss would be overwhelming.
This is not a superstition-based supposition drawn from overexposure to A.A., a generally calamitous, outdated, and cultish outfit. It is a conviction based on empirical data. I am 0 for probably 500-plus in my lifetime when it comes to “I’ll just get drunk this one night to shut out the noise, then go on like nothing happened.” It never goes that way. Never has and never will. It’s me against the realities of my own biochemistry, which is like trying to keep Amazon from swallowing your small online business when it decides it needs a snack. And knowing all of that makes me remember how much I actually care about the life that I have—the freedom to make choices, the ability to be casually accountable, the assurance of a few daily laughs even if they’re mostly at my own expense, remembering almost everything I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours. And waking up every morning to that wagging tail and grateful expression.
I can run almost as much as I want and not have to fret when I can’t or choose not to. I’ve made music a whole new dimension in my life, and that’s something I can keep improving at and learning more about if I maintain a relatively clear mind.
Most people who get to the dismal point I did—wanting to die while staring at motel televisions at 3 a.m. knowing the money is about to run out again, awash in self-pity and sappy memories of wases and weres and could-have-beens—never wind up getting their lives together. They die of addiction, suicide, or some indecipherable mishmash of the two, news that crushes the soul every time. That doesn’t make me extra-resourceful for having lasted things out. It means I fucking lucked out. I may not seem to appreciate that much of the time, but most of what you people see is me unloading and processing. It’s impossible for me not to appreciate the basic reasons I’m still alive, however churlish the presentation may frequently be.
The people who helped make this happen, and continue to buttress my bitchy self today in a variety of ways, will never get enough of my thanks. I can’t use this space to thank them individually, but I can use it to remind myself to do exactly that, where it counts, in the real world of spoken words and hugs.