Six years dry
On this side lies sheer unmitigated madness. The alternative is incalculably worse
It’s just past 8 p.m. in Colorado on November 22, 2022. It would have been right around this time exactly six years ago, about three-quarters of a mile from where I sit and also on a Tuesday, that I last took a drink of an alcoholic beverage.
On the surface, I don’t consciously “work on” being abstinent in textbook ways. I don’t regularly attend 12-step or other group meetings, I don’t have a sponsor, I don’t go to therapy, I don’t pray, I don’t avoid situations where people are drinking (admittedly a mostly passive process since I avoid most gatherings of people, period). More traditionally problematic is that rather than actively seeking to avoid fostering resentments, I order them by the Amazon vanload, inject them with steroids, and copulate sweetly with them until the dreary waltz of dawn.
That said, I talk about my drinking past with the same people, remember key dates good and bad, and continually compare my lowest points of any given day to what those situations would turn into if I doused myself in alcohol. And when I think of my drink of choice, straight vodka, and force myself to focus on the taste, I can induce close to a gag reaction, even though vodka itself rarely made me throw up. I kept expecting this reaction to go away the first few years, but it’s barely faded.
God is not dead; He just owns a moonshine still.
I don’t experience regular or even occasional thoughts of drinking, despite spending several hours a week stewing in the same brand of frothing-at-the-mind agitation that was formerly my primary signal to say fuck it (any active destructive drinker’s motto and catch-all justification for poor decision-making) and head for the liquor store to abolish whatever sobriety I’d accumulated, never more than four-plus months dating back to 2003. I simply sit with discomfort or bleed it away by walking, messing with my electric piano, talking to my dog, or playing a mental video at 10X speed of what a drink would quickly lead to at this or any point. I use other drugs, mostly stimulants and reputed aphrodisiacs and none of them exciting or dangerous or remotely capable of extinguishing my thoughts or consciousness.
A.A. is awash in nonsense, most of it earnest. But as they say in the rooms, it’s undeniable that once certain people achieve a certain physiological and psychological companionship with ethanol, processes within that person’s brain can’t be unwired. There is no becoming a “normal drinker.” And if I started again, left unchecked, I’d be walking and talking (not well) at a BAC in the 0.40 range within a week. The only people who understand or even believe that this happens are police officers and emergency medical personnel, who deal consistently with around 20 percent of the population max, and about 80 percent of whose daily interactions involve this erratic subgroup.
I think the main reason for the fuck it response disappearing is the basic passage of time having eroded away the kinds of persistent justifications I grudgingly reserved for making catastrophic decisions. I had to remove myself from Boulder for the first six or so months after I quit, living among a couple hundred somewhat kindred souls in a setting someone could write a novel about, until I had committed to a different set of internal responses. I was also tired by late 2016 of causing and experiencing the same repetitive set of adversities, even though I could have said the same thing ten years sooner.
I was never confused about this along the way, not once. I just didn’t give a shit, not for long enough to matter.
When I think of what I surrendered most and most often as a result of drinking, I don’t think of specific consequences related to particular events—measurable or intangible losses that in most cases are beyond total or even partial restoration. I can live with the logical result of having made choices that resulted in predictable outcomes. I think instead of how organically I sacrificed my own freedom, at every level.
The freedom, first of all, to think clearly. The freedom to be trusted by people whose only standing expectation was that I not drink alcohol. The freedom to express correct ideas, often, perhaps most notably when I was at the local detox against my will and arguing with the profoundly ignorant 22-year-olds staffing the place about, among other things, the efficacy of Vivitrol.
No one surrenders the right to be treated like a human by medical types, but I made it easier for this to happen to me. Im the summer of 2016, I washed up drunk a number of times in short order at the local emergency department, never on purpose, and was seen by the same pissed-off and jaded doctor, a fat redhead, a few times. When I showed up sober that fall complaining of what was obviously cellulitis, the same doctor turned me away, attributing the lesions on my arm to road-rash or something.
I came back a day later and was admitted to the hospital by a nurse practitioner for cellulitis and given 48 hours of intravenous vancomycin and something else. I could have lost an arm or died; I’d done an amazing number on a lifelong gem of an immune system. And I avoid Boulder Community Hospital for many reasons, but one of them is that if I saw that sneering ginger motherfucker in there, I would probably wind up in jail and both of us would land in the hosp…oh.
Anyway, the NP who did treat me all but gave me her blessing to punch him in the face, but the important point is that a delinquent doctor didn’t give me cellulitis. I worked hard for months to do that to myself.
Vocationally, I’ve enjoyed a more-or-less symmetrical sweeping arc from poverty when I sobered up to maximum lifetime savings at the onset of covid to mostly living on those savings after the company I was working for was dissolved and I lost most of my motivation to rejoin even a remote workforce. I mentioned formally transitioning into a new line of work, but although I have the licensure. I have to finish a long editing job I’ve been very slow to complete.
I don’t work harder than I do because it makes no sense for me to do that. I don’t stress because I could support myself and my dog by working at a 7-11. I’ve tried to assign extra meaning to, and wring special pleasures from, the coaching and writing I have continued to do in the past couple of years, although this can be as precarious as manipulating the apparent value of a given form of cryptocurrency.
There is probably something out there that could make me consciously want to drink. I’m almost sure of it. But I’m almost hoping to encounter such a situation just to have something else to wax apoplectic about. I don’t doubt that being frank about my feelings and most of my obvious sources of regret helps me keep them in perspective.
I don’t know if this matters either, but being a total fuckup is no longer a source of shame anyway, depending on what color your hair is and how you go about it. It could even be a path to getting free running shoes. And speaking of running, that’s a reward of living alcohol-free, not a preventive measure (for me). I routinely got drunk while in the middle of 100-mile weeks in decades of yore if it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and it frequently did. If I could count on endorphins from exercise alone to keep me straight, I would have cleaned myself up a long time ago (and Boulder wouldn’t be awash in functional alcoholics capable of startlingly impressive performances).
And I’ve of course left out the main reason I wouldn’t dream of getting drunk at this point. I was well into establishing and nurturing these convictions before Rosie moved in with me in the early summer of 2018. But her presence—and she’s now been with me for just over half over her 8.7 years—makes me a more responsible person severalfold in every way, and my remaining capable of caring for her 24/7 is one of those responsibilities.
And what a terrible burden it is.
I don’t like to proofread essays like these because that leads to editing, which leads to an inevitable loss of legitimacy as I become tempted, for no good reason at all, to draw back some of my outpouring. So I imagine this contains typos. I can live with them this time.
Someone is getting sober tonight, I bet.