Ten Weeks Sober Today

Ten Weeks Sober Today!

Since I made the decision and committed to sobriety, sitting here at ten weeks I feel pretty confident that I will not be drinking again in my lifetime.  If that sounds a little arrogant and complacent, I'll just say "I do not function effectively when alcohol is a part of my life" so I can't drink.  But the truth is I can finish a days work and drive past a liquor store and think "I could drink three bottles of wine and get smashed just like that, right now, tonight"  But I don't.  Knowing that prison of being trapped and drunk all the time.  And ruining my burgeoning sober days count (70 is such a source of pride for me!)

I have revealed to people at work or in business that "I do not drink."  This is a little step for me, people I would otherwise talk about drinking in a positive, "Yeah, I know wine" manner I now talk to in terms of "I don't drink" and "It's amazing how good you will feel."  I said it like that instead of saying "I'm an alcoholic" or "I can't drink" as I know the shame and status issues that go with being other of those tags.

I've switched from selling wines to warning signs of alcohol, and how it is basically poison dressed up with French phrases, some half baked crap about "tastes of avocado and burnt boysenberries" and bottled.  I am aware of the ex-smoker syndrome, so I don't go overboard, but I am passionate.

Never drinking again in my life.  That is a big statement, but I have so much other shit I want to do other than be mourning my life away drunk.  I can't wish back the times I had beautiful days or opportunities to do things and I chose to go and buy alcohol and sit around and drink it.  Such a shame, such a waste.

In going ten weeks sober I have been through my birthday and a few nights out so have been able to test my resolve and more importantly demonstrate my resolve to people close to me.  Also, I have revealed this blog to a couple of people and let them in on my innermost thoughts and ramblings so that has been a revelation as well.  There is nothing so brave as revealing a blog filled with personal feelings and sometimes embarrassing anecdotes.  Letting someone pick through my blogposts and share what they know of me with what I reveal here is very confronting.  But I have done it and it is not the end of the world.  Please share your thoughts below.

Drinking Water

Yesterday I drank four bottles of water between lunch and dinner. Sure, I was thirsty but then I got that 'full of liquid' feeling and started pissing crystal clear. So I refilled the water bottle and drank it empty again, even though I was full.

Fire and Heat and Anger and Alcohol

Funny how a full feeling in my bladder has such strong associations with relaxation and partying and, well, just being a drunk bastard. I can walk you around every place I have lived and show you the spots where I used to piss when I was drinking.

Just standing there, hanging out in the wind, sometimes no hands so it would look like I was not pissing but in fact looking at something, or about to pick something up. And if you walked past you would probably guess that I was drunk again and pissing next to the bamboo, but I wouldn't think that you would've known, so to me it never happened.

"See, no hands, just um, stretching or rolling my shoulders. Or about to walk over there and - um, do something." I would lie to myself.

Before I could move on I would have to bend down and pick up my glass of wine or bottle of beer from the ground. Other times I would be so drunk I would just walk off and leave the drink there - to be found days later with a dead insect lolling in the liquid. I never drank it after a few days, it was gross... (Except for one time, and I gagged on the cockroach or whatever it was and was hacking out a terrible cough of spittle and mucous and bits of arthropod.) And besides, I'm sure the alcohol had evaporated or something, so yeah, I never drank 'garden wine' again.

And then, when I was drinking wine straight from the bottle, I would place the empty delicately against a tree trunk or nestle it in a shrub so as not to make that giveaway tinkling sound. And you would never know. Except that I did the double step stagger at the top of the path and you would blink to confirm you just saw me nearly fall over at just past eleven on a Saturday morning.

So drinking water is now a flushing pleasure, imagining all the toxins and salts dissolving and taking with away the anger and heat of yesterday. I still have a love of liquids and the mouthfeel of wetness and moisture, not sweet or cold or hot, just liquids in general. That's why I put the image of the fire - it is quenched by water, fuelled by alcohol.

thirty seventh birthday

Thirty seven today and I'm sitting here at 1am in between working a night shift.
This is the first birthday I have had since escaping alcohol, and I'm stripped bare of all that hostility and anger and arrogant bravado that went with it. Instead there is a kind of quiet optimism that I am finally functioning on some normal level. There's a dream montage with the lights coming on after the party, and I'm standing alone in the smoky room, with empty bottles knee deep around me.

With this clarity and calm there's no better time to make some decisions and choices for the next three years leading up to turning forty. So I'll start another list. But first some thoughts on how I will get to the list.

1. Healthy. Basically I'm still a fat bastard so there is plenty of room for improvement. Maybe I should jump on the triathlon bandwagon - after I get sorted out and can actually finish one. So here's for starting a plan and sticking to it. Here's two embarrassing confessions - I eat fucking biscuits and I don't eat fruit. That has to change today.

2. Wealthy. Being drunk all the time I made some brave stupid decisions and they don't go away when you're talking banks and debt. So I have to front up and just pay them off like everyone else - there is no magic escape clause, and ignoring shit doesn't help anyone. So, yeah, paying off debts. Simply live within my means.

3. Wise. As a know-it-all drunk I made a great course dropout. So I will re-kindle the life-long learning thing. Will start small with a photography course.

4. Career. I have a job, and a mortgage to pay, so that will be steady for a bit longer. But I want to explore online writing further as that is where I would like to be in three years. So I need a plan to get there. Any ideas?

Tha Marijuana Post Part Two

Life moved on and marijuana came and went like fast food - it was just sort of there in the background. We mustn't forget alcohol was my first true love and she always stood by me day in day out. But smoking pot and having a lust for alcohol truly blossomed into a habit when I was at university.

I drank and I drank and I got stoned in between. Just that I wasn't going to that many lectures and I was losing motivation and momentum in my studies. So I left law school and just did philosophy and some history, but then that started to slide so soon enough I was suspended from study. That winter I just faded away from the university scene and dropped out altogether.

I lost touch with all the university up and comers and found myself tooling around with some other people who were basically at a loose end like me.  It was the lost weekend time, where I was at an age that it was still sort of OK to be finding myself and in between jobs. 

I was living by the beach in a narrow terrace and made sort of friends with some of the neighbours.
Long haired me riding a pushbike around town with a four litre cask in my backpack.  Doing odd landscaping jobs, just spending time without having to study and be somethings.

The Marijuana Blog Post

Pot, skunk, mull, weed, green; whatever - you get the picture.  When I first met Marijuana she was a beguiling mystery - today I know her as a broken-down whore.  From the dizzying teen highs of summer bushwalking to the cold and lonely Tuesday-morning-whacked - I have done pot to death just like alcohol.  Now, we have a long distance relationship - if we bump into each other at a party, we are polite, but we don't swap numbers.

Growing up marijuana was on the periphery of my circle - I was always in the top class and busily reading and wasn't really exposed to the drug dudes.  So when my sister moved in with a pot smoker, I went around for a smoke.  I was sixteen.

It was a bright and airy upstairs flat with high ceilings in the middle of town.  We took turns having bongs.  We whispered and were polite and inhaled and lay back on the bean bags and time stood still.  Then we cracked up into girlish giggling until our stomachs hurt.  It was like looking at the world through a quirky, nonsense lens.

Imperceptibly, I began making adjustments to my life so I could have more access to pot, or have somewhere to smoke it once I had it, and just as gently, I moved away from those who did not do it, and towards those who did.

The Nicolas Cage Blog Post

As a drunk you populate your world with people who won't interfere with the most important thing - getting drunk. So eventually you end up alone (Leaving Las Vegas 1995), and facing death full of regrets (Adaptation 2002). Along the way you have manipulated people, let down people or left people. But always there were people - those who will get drunk with you; those who quietly tolerate your drinking; and those who avoid you.

The first group have seen you at your worst (or near enough) and how quickly you deteriorate from quite drunk to borderline arrest material. They know you can be an entertaining, ebullient dinner party guest, but have noticed how you start searching the pantry to drink anything after the good wine has gone.

The second group tolerate your drinking - they smile at your drunken jokes, or sit through Christmas lunch with an untouched glass of wine just so you don't feel uncomfortable. They either quietly despise you or pity you. This group is wary of you. They have seen a drunk before and identify you as one, but just because you keep it together when they are around, you think they don't know, just like the third group. The third group simply avoids you.

At some stage, you recruit a close friend who would never, never ask you to stop drinking. It is an unsaid contract, so it is likely this person will be alcoholic or have addiction experience.

Ben drinks and drinks and drinks and Sera is there with a bemused devotion, knowing her flaws, and accepting Ben as flawed too, except he his just a drunk. Sera consummates his ultimatum with her vow "I do". The voiceless soundtrack is fitting as you can imagine what utter bullshit is coming out of his drunken mouth.

My wife has watched as I spilled wine in a restaurant in Italy, and waited anxiously as I stumbled around for somewhere to buy alcohol late at night in Budapest. Watched as I have gone to bed with a half full glasses of wine, to drink on waking in the morning. Or kicked me as I lay drunk on cold kitchen tiles passed out, not waking. Just being there and, more importantly, still being there today is a fucking miracle of some sort.

But even with her love, you are still a stinking alcoholic, and on those occasions where she does have the temerity to "ask you to stop drinking" you react. It is outrageous to even consider taking away your alcohol - after all, without the illusion of drunkenness, the life you have been avoiding is just drudgery. There is no magic without alcohol, because you are fearful of giving anything meaning or passion because then you might feel pain or loss. Even simple emotional stuff is totally off limits.

Because you are so closed to all your experiences they are bundled up in little pockets of resentment, bitterness and non forgiveness. And this limits your life, because you have given away the power to take charge and interpret what happens in your life, the way you want to.

In Adaptation, Donald "I'm gonna be a screenwriter - like YOU!" Kaufmann owns his emotions, even though it is misplaced, unrequited, or simply wrong. The emotion exists nonetheless - it is a flutter in his stomach, or a tingling up his spine. And by owning it, Donald has the balls to harness powerful meaning from what others would dismiss as awkward fantasy. And it makes his life richer. Simple.

Instead of self censoring the love, Donald Kaufman identifies it, has the balls to go up to the girl and say it, and takes away an experience that is truly his.

Like today; I was delivering gift hamper parcels with my wife. I jumped out the car and the woman who answered the door was D, the older sister of the girl I never asked on a date in when I was fourteen! Un-fucking-believable! I looked at D and saw her sister's eyes and felt that flush of missed love, a missed crush. An episode that never quite happened. But it is my moment, and I can cherish that beautiful, innocent me and the potential love that wasn't realised.

Status Anxiety - or - Just a Casual

This is the place I'm in - working all the time, coming home mildy fatigued and seeing the kids and wife and then falling into bed.  And then doing it again.  Not drinking, totally off drugs etc except asthma meds.  At least I have a pleasant day job and am able to pick my hours as a casual and say no to work when it suits me.  So I am grateful each day and am able to reflect that I am "doing okay"

But nestled alongside the yin of the casual freedom is the yang of lacking security, which means things come our way a little slower, and our things aren't as shiny and new as others, and we mightn't be headed off on overnight trips as often as we would like.  Or be pulling out kitchens and bathrooms.  Which, as I said, is all fine.  I'm sober, exercising etc.  Life's good, but, y'know.

This is fine for my day to day life, but it comes undone when I am introduced as "name, occupation".  I find myself caught between fumbling to add a fittingly impressive postscript, or just leaving it at that.  So some people see me as below them, and others see me as, ahem, below them.  It's a status thing.

"Every adult life could be defined by two great love stories.  The first - the story of our quest for sexual love... is socially accepted and celebrated.  The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale..."  writes Alain de Botton. 

He continues "status is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain over a lifetime... a high position hangs on what we can achieve; and we may fail due to stupidity, or an absence of self knowledge, macro-economics or malevolence."

(If you listen quietly, you can hear the alcoholic me skipping from 'working hard, and being grateful for the little things,' to failure being inevitable due to the four excuses of 'stupidity, lack of self knowledge, macro-economics or malevolence' - found another way to justify getting drunk!)




I catch myself lowering my future expectations of myself because of my current status.  I guess it is something to do with momentum and also has something to do with confidence. 

But there is such a sting to being quietly ignored or not acknowledged by a new acquaintance once they have assessed your status and deemed it unworthy of their time.  And then the alcoholic me chips in "Well fuck you too" and I pull away further, ensuring the interaction is over. 

And it has nothing to do with being alcoholic or unlucky or not recognized - I recall often making choices to lead me away from the safe, well trodden path of career and qualification.  I chose not to  earn a label and become a "something" people could easily identify and apply status. 

Just that now, in middle age, I appreciate how comforting a label would be, and that I could just exist as a "something" and be self satisfied - going off fishing or something.  Instead, I am living out there and re-inventing myself, and facing the next chapter in my life sober.  So it is fucking scary and I am having to fake it  keep it real until I make it. 

So at once it is exhilarating and fresh to be looking forward to whatever I choose to be, it is also mourning a little that I am not becoming a expert, or senior partner or making the move into management in my chosen career that I didn't have.  And enjoying the privileges the status would bring. Just being me.

One year Anniversary

So its one year since I started this blog. Might be time for a little reflection and assessment of where we are at.

In the past year I have

1. Gone sober for a week around September 2010, then crashed on the Saturday afternoon, and found myself lining up at a bottleshop on the Sunday.

2. Just basically drunk even crazier than normal all summer, so I was drinking from like waking up when I didn't have any other commitments (read - work).

3. Hit crisis point or rock bottom again and stopped drinking on April 20th. For the final time. That's 44 days ago! Quite a tally and honestly the longest I have gone without alcohol for twenty years or since I was in school, or since I was under the legal age.

4. The Sadness of Beer this storyis where I have come from - thinking buying cheap beer was saving money! What the? Buying beer is never saving money. On that note, at my drinking levels I have not spent about $500 on alcohol by going sober for 44 days.

5. I feel calmer, more motivated (have finally finished the chicken coop) and am going to bed at 8pm and waking up around 5 or 6 am. It is how other people live - and it makes me wonder whether I should regret all the years I wasted being hungover... But that was my decision and hey it wasn't as if I was in a prison or anything.

6. Just writing on my other blog I am learning to be grateful and appreciate that things are what they are and I could be in a whole lot worse shape but for some very lucky bits of providence.

7. So here's to celebrate the sober blog and how it works even if it did take a year to get finally sorted for me. Oh, that's another thing, sobriety has taught me to recognise and just appreciate it for what it is - patience.