Seven booze-free years: a case study in the rewards of health and personal stability prevailing over the costs of excessive clarity
Being simultaneously committed to both alcohol sobriety and cynical misery offers a window into one's true core values
The last time I had an alcohol-containing beverage was on November 22, 2016. U.S. President Barack Obama was two months away from leaving office and, in theory, active political life. Two weeks earlier, Donald Trump had won a presidential election I had wound up skipping. This victory that had thrown the country into apoplexy: Trump voters couldn’t believe the guy had actually won, while Hillary Clinton voters were aghast that a rambling buffoon had stolen destiny from the establishment’s chosen lizard-queen.
I had therefore incidentally chosen to quit drinking for good—even if I didn’t believe this yet—at a time when all of America had never felt more like tying one on and staying blotto for as long as it took for the shock, hilarity, or both to wear off.
Trump, who very much likes being in the news, is still very much in the news. He’d probably be elected president again if the election were held today, and his impressively bent targeting by the broken justice system is another nonstop source of clicks and screen-gawps for the nation’s slack-faced normies. Using the peripatetic Trump’s public presence as metric, it doesn’t seem like anywhere close to seven years has passed since I dried up.
I had no idea that Trump’s election would herald a complete collapse of whatever integrity the mass media still possessed at that point. I hated Trump because I thought he was a self-dealing dumbass and blowhard; because I’ve never wavered on this, I also never believed any of the “Russian agent” claims about him, because I don’t see how it’s possible to portray someone as both a hapless retard and a diabolical international conspirator. And as soon as Robert Mueller started indicting others in Trump’s real or purported orbit, it became obvious that Trump himself was never going down and that Mueller was already busy doing things that would retroactively justify his long, expensive tenure as a visibly addled “special prosecutor.”)
I did, however, believe a lot of claims the media made about Donald Trump and his associates that were simply not true. It’s possible for someone to be a seriously flawed dude and an undisguised grifter without being the earthy incarnation of Satan, but the media were, and remain, obligated to lie as much as necessary to prevent him from becoming POTUS again. Sometime in 2019, I’d say, I had come to realize that the media were spouting unpretentious nonsense. I hated this morbid shift far more than I could ever dislike having (yet) an(other) beaming and dissembling idiot as a president.
The onset of the Wokism-Covid era in the spring of 2020 was about three and a half years into my sobriety. That’s around the same amount of time all of us have now been experiencing that era. When the flood of absurd restrictions and false accusations of nationwide mega-racism began, I’d had Rosie for close to two years. I’d never had more money saved, and, even though I had given up running road and track races a few months into resuming that experiment in 2018, I was running every day, taking the occasional road trip, and doing as well as anyone with my parochial outlook and limited ambitions could expect.
I can honestly hold the following two beliefs at the same time: I’m glad I haven’t had a drink in seven years because it has made all the difference in the world, and I wish I had been run over by a bus or dropped dead of an undiagnosed berry aneurysm around March 1, 2020. I’m grateful I am experiencing what I’m experiencing with a mostly clear head and near-perfect health, but I really didn’t need to see or experience any of the last few years. It’s one thing for a significant slice of the U.S. population to be committed to foolishness or outright lunacies. But as these solecisms have come to envelop friends and family members—duped individuals who in the course of being flagrantly incorrect have either impugned my motives and sources or questioned my sanity—I’ve become literally hopeless about the future of society.
And I am not conditioned to exist with equanimity in an anti-intellectual, pro-injustice, pro-war, pro-racism culture. People can all take their Ukraine (remember that place?) and BLM (remember them?) flags, jabs, masks, ad hoc genders, false gods, bombing campaigns, and financial-market friggeries, baste them in cyanide-sauce, and shove them down their gluttonous rumbling throats. I would rather be personally desolate than embrace mass demoralizations and deceits and smile through my own lying teeth just to maintain or better in-group standing.
Background hopelessness is not to be confused with unremitting personal misery. At least not for me. The trick is simply not viewing myself as a citizen anymore, but instead as a steward of a valuable canine and a presence in the lives of a few humans. Half a lifetime ago, I essentially committed to being a self-sustaining vagabond who preferred running, reading, and mostly solitary activities to building a career or assisting in the production and raising of one or more assuredly defective-to-deformed children. Apart from all my drinking, I didn’t really “build” anything, and hence my life is what it is.
And I don’t think that part was ever going to be any different, because although I respect a few individual humans, I don’t respect this version of human society whatsoever and have never really respected past versions, either. To the extent I have ever cared to impress anyone, it hasn’t been using any of the traditional and readily available mechanisms. As has always been the case, I’d rather spend more of my time reading, wandering outside, and playing music than interacting with other primates. Besides, almost everyone I know or see today who owns anything of real value in this bitch-rigged economy is some combination of lucky and a thief, with most of these people reluctant to admit to or acknowledge the existence, never mind the critical value, or either factor.
The main reason I don’t drink anymore is simple habit. Go long enough without doing something that you used to do and think about nonstop, and at some point, you just won’t see this as a go-to anymore. This is not the whole battle, and gurus in 12-step groups advise against coasting along on complacency alone. But a few years of avoiding something that was physically bad for me anyway was apparently enough to flip some kind of switch.
On a more deliberative level, I credit staying dry with two factors I didn’t see becoming important seven years ago, at least not to the extent I value them now. One of these is never wanting to become a part of the medical system again. Not for routine appointments, not for unforeseen problems, not for shots, not for anything. Never again. Almost all doctors and the people who work for them are either retards or liars. If I ever again find myself feeling ill and know it’s bad—like puking-up-blood, ashy-faced bad—I’ll lose myself in the woods and take a huge handful of sedatives and disappear under the surface of a pond. No noise, no drama. I already would have done something like this were I not a father of sorts.
The other driving factor is not wanting to be intoxicated by alcohol is because of the poly-vulnerable state it produces. I won’t take any drug that causes me to “black out” or not remember what I’ve done, or increases any chance I could be somehow exploited. This is not paranoia, it’s just sensible thinking and the way I should have more often considered things when I was blacked out for weeks at a time, wobbling from place to place and staying in decidedly decrepit motels.
There’s a third factor, but I didn’t group it with the other two because I did see it coming. I planned to move a dog in with me as soon as I had been dry for a bit, and I have done exactly that. I can’t imagine the horror I would feel if I got drunk and had to drive her to the emergency clinic, or left the door open and lost her, or any of that. A certain dose of healthy terror is a great deterrent in some scenarios.
I don’t do 12-step meetings anymore because I can’t sit in a room occupied by talking strangers, especially here in Boulder. Someone will say something galactically wrong within moments, not about anything to do with drinking but about some other zeitgeist, and it makes more sense for me to avoid those environments than invade them and wind up foiling the serenity-achieving efforts of one or more parties.
Most of the “I’ve been sober for such-and-such a period” stories you’ll see are rife with descriptions of how much better life is all around without ethanol in the mix. That’s absolutely true for me, even if that doesn’t shine through. There is no reason to make what is left of my life worse even if I believe, and in fact hope, that there is not much of it left. I don’t see it as uncoherent that I plan to terminate what is clearly a “better life” than the one I had before far sooner than it would likely end on its own; this just means that harm reduction, or any kind of relief, only goes so far in creating the sense of real thriving.
If there is any lesson in this, it’s that even someone who consciously and vigorously looks forward to not existing at all can still see enormous value in accepting the experience for what it is, and maintaining the ability to be responsible even in the context of few genuine extant responsibilities.
