rare perk of sobriety

A year plus in I'm starting to notice an actual mental payoff to not drinking. Yes -- even above and beyond the lack of daily hangovers.

A, um, new kind of internal strength. Sharper focus. Remembering more day to day, being more aware of the subtexts to a conversation. More aware of what I want from the world long-term/how the world should/could be. What needs to be done to avoid getting killed on the road or run over by my professional life. More aware of how individual and family dynamics evolve and relate. Of the need for closeness and clarity. Of how beautiful Spanish is on the page.

Even hanging out in drinking situations has gotten easier. A fun project to match the trajectory people take when they drink and loosen up on your own. In a way I actually over-compensate and loosen up further than people. So I'm the asshole who says the wrong thing with no relevant cultural pretext to back it up. Crackpot role to relish.

matter-of-fact ghosts

When the weather gets crisp and cold like this a stillness spreads across the world and the world gets the quality of early morning pond before sunrise. When the weather gets like this if you drag yourself out of bed early, bundle up, and bring a cheap giveaway thermos of weak Wawa coffee you can sit on a rock or on the damp ground itself to watch the lake, to watch the lake as small washes of implied light demarcate the day. To watch memories of pain surface like sunnies or bass to briefly break the stillness of the morning water.

(Left to his own devices the balding bureaucrat feels another maybe side effect of no-longer drinking: Memories that haven't seen the light of day in ages break years of bad practice, of numbing anaesthetic).

What do you do with the pain you remember, tangled with the pain you caused others? How do you free yourself from it to live in the present? I’ve been tempted to find other ways to numb this dull pain because I don’t know how to look these memories in the face. It’s like being visited by matter-of-fact ghosts, droll ghosts that by this point bore and sadden as much as terrify.

When we were kids we used to go fishing. We mostly practiced catch and release but sometimes in between we would torture the fish. It wasn’t how I thought of it then, it felt more like playing. I remember we would whirl them on the end of the line like a kind of lasso. Sometimes the line would wrap around a branch, resulting in the improbable miracle of fish in a tree. All you needed to catch them was bread rolled in a ball on a hook.

Being exposed to violence and how you pass it onto other beings on some instinctive level. As a child you are simply a conduit of violence; it can pass through you (with you as its instrument) and you don’t even know. As an adult you might not know but you aren’t justified in that, because you’re in a position where you could and should know.

Throwing bread into the water, this time of course without a hook and an intent to twirl. Like apologizing to the fish, or their descendants. If they’re ginger to approach the surface I can’t blame them.

non-essential life

It’s the chore you think you're going to finish in an afternoon but after a few big piles it starts raining, and everyone knows it’s folly to rake in the rain. Weeks later you get to a point where there’s one more leaf piled on your front curb than swirling in your yard, you declare a majority, and you check it off your list.

Then some Saturday morning weeks after VL-day you hear an early, rare sound, like something descending too close. You get dressed and go to the front window, hoping in your secret heart to see people hurling themselves down the inflatable slide of a misplaced jumbo jet, or at least buildings on fire.

Men in construction vehicles and men with leaf blowers make slow, reiterant progress up and down the block. There’s a quality of municipal gentility, of man reliant on his fellow man. And also one of alien invasion, of HR sentinels for a superior and disinterested race emptying a target planet of non-essential life.

Now a few spared leaves swirl, a few stay stuck to the street, pressed and faded etchings of recent history. There are days, love, when the things we never say ring loud inside, like lies of omission.

seven months/photo album

The other day L. and my mom and I were looking through photos of the past five to ten years. Taken in cities all over the world, with friends near and far gone. The two common denominators to each photo: one, I'm holding a drink; and two, I don't remember much at all about the setting in which the photo was taken.

So it's been seven months since I had a drink. For stretches I've felt clear and easy and right. At other points (now) I crave a good beer, would kill for just one good beer or a sharp glass of wine, or maybe 5 martinis or a nice simple case of beer and a joint.

It's not that if I drank one I'd wake up under a pile of cops, or sleep my way through suburbia (delicious tense hopeless moms, fear not), or start pounding full bottles of vodka every night and end up one of those red-faced commuter jerks on the train. It's more that the act of not drinking has turned off some muting or filter and allowed a range of thoughts/emotions/memories to surface.

I'm interested in what's buried under there, even though some is shit, some is poison, some is scary. A lot of it is me, a strange me that I barely know, the past me.

I was thinking this morning that I will have earned a drink if I make it to one year. I think it would be a very nice glass of white wine, in Paris, with fish soup and fresh toasted bread.

Then I was thinking that I will earn a drink when I: finish all of Faulkner; read a modern novel in Spanish and understand it; publish a novel; complete an album of music; climb a large mountain or run a marathon or bike from here to the Jersey shore; and develop my own black and white photographs.

At that point I could have a drink, it wouldn't kill me. Even five out of the six. Maybe I could have one drink when I make it to the year, then another for five out of six, then take it from there. Or, I could go get a drink now...

155 emails

Today I sent 155 business-related emails and I can't remember the content of a single one I'd made plans to have lunch with my brother but by the time I'd finished emailing it was 3pm my brother was gracious and agreed to meet me for a late late lunch I finally got underway but on the way I hit a flash flood and got there at more like 4 by that point my sister her son and our kid brother had arrived and I sent a few more emails and then somebody wanted to talk on the phone in reply to the email so we talked on the phone and made plans to talk longer on the phone tomorrow then I set my phone and my computer on fire extinguishing the fire in a cloud of piss and fury and we all went for something like early dinner.

What it was was excellent Chinese the home-style bean curd perfectly soft my siblings and I don't always sit together in one place these days there are usually thousands of miles preventing that I was mad not to have the brain space to focus on this rare rainbow comet confluence and this is why I dislike the architecture of Microsoft software so much because I have unwittingly come to live inside it and in my sent items is a sad history of affirmations logistical coordinates occasional flashes of humor or warmth recommendations for fixing words fixing words and grovelingly polite requests for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I was at just about the mental level where smiling and making goofy faces at my nephew felt ambitious but achievable then in a flash he transcended my mental age and wanted more than I could possibly provide conversationally my brothers and my sister started a game where in at least one word per sentence you alter the pronunciation to make that word sound utterly different though still recognizable, to avoid cliche. It was almost nice to be so slow and fried I couldn't drive the game much myself, because I could just appreciate how smart, how present, how memorable they were.

cautery

Burning bridges give you even more than burning airlines. Because eventually they can send other planes, whereas a bridge takes time. If you want to be alone, start with the bridges. To burn a friendship fast throw insults, piss on the outstretched hand. To burn a friendship slow ignore it. When your friend drives past, turn off the lights so they can see you hide. Ignore the doorbell. To burn a relationship heap emotional abuse until you've chased the person out of town. Now call her every night and tell her how much you love her. (Tell her you're sorry, tell her you need your baby). Burn away your potential for sorrow, for kinship, for hope for anything beyond a sports score or a boatload of cash. Burn away love so the only other death you ever have to face is your own. Reach out just enough to maintain a perfunctory variable sex life. Burn away potential for emotion as a kind of cautery. Only keep hate, you need that as fuel. The others simply aren't cost effective. There are a lot of ways to burn memories. One technique is burn as you go-- pay no attention to anything that happens and you don't have to worry.

Father's Day night L. and I got a sitter and saw Up. I couldn't stop crying for the whole movie. I was happy to, it's been years since I was able to outside of being maudlin wasted. Part of being able to cry was that it was a beautiful movie, economically edited, exquisitely written, and wonderfully drawn. Another part was what parenthood has done, loving the little one without the slightest hesitation. Part of it is being more open than maybe ever, to the way I feel, the way other people feel. Part of it is that I wasn't eating popcorn or drinking a big fat soda. There was only the movie, and L and I holding hands, and our lives here.

two weeks

Last year a good octogenarian friend of mine took a fall. He bore the impact on his shoulder and arm. The arm ended up in a sling and my friend got some new meds.

I was worried and I called a bit more than usual. To my surprise he was more conversational, more lucid, quicker than he'd been in years. The major difference was that he'd stopped drinking for the meds.

Lately I've been down. There are logical reasons, work, the economy, New Jersey, American foreign policy, weight gain. But those alone shouldn't have the gravitas to trump what there is to feel joy and hope about. L. & I have a new son who's healthy, who's bright-eyed and loving, whose life opens wider every hour. We're both employed and we live within our means. The world brims with music, movies, and books. We have friends who love us. We have a furry fat grey cat who's stopped trying to kill us. We have each other.

When I say I've been down I mean I'm losing my shit and for the past few years it's gotten worse. I wake up feeling slow and without control. I become overwhelmed by basic tasks. I wade through it restless and hyper-caffeinated. I can't look people in the eye or even look near their faces. I burrow in lame tasks. I feel suicidal urges that I sublimate into slow ways to achieve the same end. All the sugar I can eat, red meat, fried food, diet soda, cup after cup of coffee. And it never feels time to reach out. Emails from people I love I've been afraid to answer for months.

All ways to be unconscious, secret ways to disappear, and all that before the sun went down. By night I'd drink. For a while I thought the drinking was the natural salve for all the craziness, something to cut the edge from it and bring me a bit closer to calm. But I started to wonder if drinking were the cause of some of it. At the very least, if drinking were amplifying my special place on the DSM-IV.

In a real Lenten move I've given up drinking for 100 days. It's been two weeks, and I feel better every day.

I took a long walk this morning first thing. Gray light by the pond, the way drops of water collect in rhythmic full beads along branchlets. Headphones mixing on the fly with birdsong in loose sync. Walking fast, picking up litter as I went.