Beck's Burro

This ditty reminds of slushing around a pool party with gazillions of litres of beer and wine and drugs and girls and skin and sleeping overnight and waking up and doing it all again and not having to work much at all. The upside of being a drop out.


And now sober, I can look back at it as some of the great times of my youth, and it is the sound of spring, which is cheekily peeking out from behind the dowdy skirt of winter.

The Meaning of Life

Purpose
this could be living happily ever after, going to heaven or even (whisper it) found at work.
Whatever it is, meaning in life comes from reaching goals and feeling fulfilled.
Even though fulfillment is hard to achieve because the state fades, people need purpose.
 Values
people need a moral structure to work out what is right and what is wrong.
There are plenty to choose from: some come from religion,
others from philosophy and still others from your friends and family.
  Efficacy
people want to make a difference and have some control over their environment
Without that, the meaning of life is reduced.
   Self-worth
we all want to feel we're good and worthwhile people
We can do this individually or by hitching ourselves to a worthy cause
Either way we need to be able to view ourselves in a positive light.

Kneeling Elephants and the Pain of Being Alive

Had a four o'clock with my GP today and went in and said everything was going fine, 120 odd days since I last drank.  I sat forward in the chair and said I was quite confident I wouldn't drink again, and that with all the spare time on my hands I was looking at going back to school.  Then I mentioned the federal government incentive of five free pyschology visits with a referral from a GP, and asked if I could get a referral for a life coach slash career counselling sessions.  He wasn't impressed and suggested I ought to focus on what had me drinking before I went into life coaching or anything like that.  I emerged from the appointment feeling deflated and flat.

"The government incentive isn't there for everyone to go and get sessions for trivial things - it's about getting assistance with acute metal illness in regional Australia, they've had to adjust the benefit because so many Eastern Suburbs mums were abusing it for therapy."  I nodded, and looked down at my hands, "So I can refer you for your alcohol issues, but not for career guidance"

I felt as though I was pressuring him for some morphine or something - it was really embarrassing to be chided for 'trying to exploit a loophole' as he put it.  I wasn't exploiting anything - I was just being honest and saying what I was at the appointment for.  So, access denied...

Thing is, I've been thinking a lot and am seeing my frustrations are coming out because I have so much free time and it is not put to best use.  And it is further frustrating when I feel I am so far behind after having been drinking for so long.  So it's a game of catch up, and I want have some pretty high expectations and I am ready to commit 100% to get a result.  And I thought some positive guidance and support would be as effective as sitting down and nattering on about all the crap from growing up and shit...

I am sort of seeking a life coach, to help with some suggestions and tips on making a career transition (moving from small business to self employed tradesman) and it is all helpful considering I haven't got a mentor or anything approaching that in my life.  So why can't I outsource it?

For how long do I have to douse myself in this alcoholic crap without trying to actively get started on something positive and new?  I admit and accept I am alcoholic, but like a survivor of sex abuse said, I am not going to let this episode colour my whole life.

So have five appointments lined up for a psychologist to discuss my alcoholism slash career change.  But I so desperately cannot see myself blathering on about parents or childhood or adolescence...  Fuck, I want to let all that shit slide - forgive and forget and buried forever.

Reflect on the benefits of a loving heart. [Buddhist texts say]: Your dreams become sweeter, you waken more easily, men and women will love you, angels and devils will love you. If you lose things they will be returned. People will welcome you everywhere when you are forgiving and loving. Your thoughts become pleasant. Animals will sense this and love you. Elephants will kneel as you go by—try it at the zoo!
Forgiveness involves perspective. We are in this drama in life that is so much bigger than our ‘little stories.’ When we can open this perspective, we see it is not just your hurt, but the hurt of humanity. Everyone who loves is hurt in some way. Everyone who enters the marketplace gets betrayed. The loss is not just your pain, it is the pain of being alive. Then you feel connected to everyone in this vastness.

So here goes for the next leg of the journey.  I am just realising how much of an advocate I have to be for me on this process.  I remember the same GP wouldn't prescribe me champix  to give up cigarettes - so I got the script from another GP and gave up (four years ago now).   But he resisted and I proved his reluctance wrong.  It is tiring though having to go around him, thinking he is some kind of roadblock to my progress.  But I guess I am open to forgiving him for that...

Procrastination

So I got out of bed eventually, as the wife and girls were getting dressed, and I put my breakfast on the table as the girls tumbled out the door.  They waved as they went down the driveway and I chomped on baked beans on toast. 

This morning I am free until a 3pm shift in the afternoon, and it is a perfect opportunity to go for a bike ride around the beaches and harbour.  But I know I probably won't.

It might be procrastination on my part, or being lazy, or just feeling depressed and lethargic.  Not sure but is just not worth worrying about yet, so I think I'll go back to bed for a bit of sleep and try again later like at noon.  At least I'm not hungover.

Alcohol Free Songs

Just got back from my walk around the harbor and today I was whistling (for some unknown reason - I've been to paradise - but I've never been to me) and I changed the words to

I'm living in Paradise,
ever since I went alcohol free!


So there's todays challenge, build an 'alcohol-free' lyric from an established song and see how it goes.

Sometimes you have to skip across the words to help squeeze them into the existing lyrics.

So, yeah, I'm still sober, and just a little bit sad for content.  I guess this is called being vacantly happy, where I am content with things by and large and am letting out my frustrations on business suppliers/ associates instead of taking them home with a bottle of wine.  Is so much more satisfying actually nailing a business associate when they screw up there and then instead of being half absent and directing my frustration at the wrong thing (ie alcohol).

Have cut ties with two business associates this week who feel entitled to offer poor service/ business practise over months and months and then expect me to reciprocate at 100% professional.  Not good enough so have edited my business website and they two suppliers "no longer appear" associated with us.  Was a long time coming...

Generational Alcoholism

There comes a stage for all recovering alcoholics to do the big reveal and share with the family that "I am indeed an alcoholic" (as if they already didn't know, but more on this later).  I imagine it will be a mighty humbling experience.  I have been rehearsing ways to do it and where to do it but so far have come up with not much.  I have thought of ways to do it where they might think I am coming out ("Dad, I guess you always sort of knew in the back of your mind, but didn't want to confront it - yes, I'm ....  alcoholic!").  They know anyway, it will be just me saying it that will be the big buzz.

Maybe just wait until Christmas Day and be sitting there without a drink and without some devil's-advocate-considered-yet-provocative-opinion and let them all notice for themselves.  That is the best case scenario I have at this stage, to say I have not had a drink for like 200 days will be pretty impressive and demonstrate my commitment.

In my family alcoholism is a generational curse and all the older members have clear memories of alcoholic parents themselves and grandparents have endured life with alcoholics and so on.  For them I hope my honesty and openness will be a sign of moving forward and that they can look at me through a different lens.  I appreciate how heartbreaking it must be to see grandchildren develop into alcoholics and display the behaviors they have all seen before.

For me there is the story of my own father - as a boy trying to lift his father up off the street where he had fallen down drunk, and not being able to.  Of rifling through his pockets for coins to give his mother to buy food whilst he lay blacked out.  Or the story of the drunken uncle and his inappropriate behaviors - the real reason why he was fed before everyone else and lived 'down the back' away from the rest of the family.

Or the current batch of alcoholics, me front and centre but not nearly so desperately without hope as a sister without a home and two children to an alcoholic father, a brother in law lost to meth addiction, a step brother's death, a family culture where drugs and alcohol are never the problem, just always there.  Like an episode of Brothers and Sisters, walking around with a glass of wine, arguing.

So it will not come as a big surprise to most of them that I am alcoholic, once word gets round that "B stopped drinking"  - more surprising that I admitted it and stopped.  They all knew quietly that I had chosen drink and deception and they would have seen the cracks appearing, and noticed me just as quickly struggling to maintain some impression that everything was normal and ok.  They all knew about my depression in my early twenties, and how I emerged more assertive and outspoken.  And how I have always 'loved' a drink...

One thing I do know is that I won't be revealing that I am writing all my progress down in a blog.  There is one sure fire way to trigger the self-censorship mode and that would be it for me, having to write and then edit for family reading purposes.  For sure it would be ok if they read it like you do and left a comment, but not if they are going to read and then expect to discuss face to face each thought and detail.  It would be exhausting.

So here's to sharing deep dark secrets with family, but only so far.  There's some things that they just don't need to know...

Dead Friends From School

Just found out a school friend died of a heart attack at a rugby game - way back in 2008! So we weren't that close obviously. We were in the same classes through school and I would always beat him in every test, no matter how hard he tried - and it infuriated him. Drifted apart when it became clear I got my kicks from being naughty and taking shit and he was a 'responsible leader' or whatever that was.



He was the total straight arrow, I remember having an argument with him and he walked away because I wanted to go out and get drunk and lie about going to the movies (as 14 year old alcoholics do) and he just wanted to actually watch the surfing movie and then go home - like a normal person. We had a stand off and pushed each other, I held him down, but nothing happened. We didn't go to the beach together any more.

Later on he made partner at an accounting firm and was best man at all these weddings and played 1000 games of rugby and was the club president or something. I was sneaking around getting drunk, being anonymous, being a lone wolf.

Oh well, he's dead now - I get this curious feeling and want to stick my finger up at him for some reason. That feeling of rejection from him when I wanted him to come along and be drunk and his strength to say no, or back then it was probably just a stupid risky idea and he was being sensible. Like finishing his degree and being a suit and joining clubs and being a team player.

But that's not me, never comfortable with that fawning adoration of people I hardly know in teams and stuff.

So awful as it sounds, I feel sort of vindicated - me at the start of a lifelong recovery compared to safe-white-bread-athlete-accountant rotting under some rocks in the ground. Hmm, don't know if that is right but it's definitely the feeling I have.

Friday Drinks After Work

Yeah, they don't exist anymore. So here's to feeling fresh on the Saturday upside and getting stuck into those family things sans hangover.  Have been very busy at work and that's always a bonus, except for when I butchered this Lichtenstein pop art - might've been funny if I had any creativity left.


Which reminds me of that delightfully indulgent phase I went through when everyone was a drunken genius - so I soaked up a few more buckets of booze being a bohemian artist. Wrote pages and pages of tense love lorn juvenalia about no one in particular or if it was about someone it was Maia from film school who I sat near and talked to but never actually got to - you guessed it - go for a drink with. Probably because I was drunk already (not probably, I actually was, a speechless drunkeness where I was too embarrassed to actually say much because she would see I was already drunk and it was like only 5 in the afternoon).

So a total failure to launch...

Alcoholism Myths

As an alcoholic, almost everything you choose to believe about alcohol is bullshit.  Completely, utterly, bullshit.  There are so many ways you have manipulated the events and how you interpret them that you can almost make yourself believe that you did turn water into wine or whatever.  Here's my top ten with some help from Doug Thorburn's Alcoholism Myths and Realities.

The Chemistry of Alcohol

This was a real eye opener for me.  Simply put, alcoholics' only partly process the alcohol so we only get the 'fun' feeling, not the 'eww' feeling straight after.  This is part of the reason why we can drink so much poison willingly.

The human body converts alcohol first into a poison, acetaldehyde, and then into acetate, both of which find their way to the brain.  While the former substance - in the same class of chemicals as formaldehyde - perversely makes the drinker feel good, the latter causes feelings of nausea, hangover and sleepiness.  Now think about it: if a person experiences a quick conversion into acetate, he feels lousy or sleepy and is unlikely to keep drinking.  If on the other hand, the body blocks the conversion of acetaldehyde into acetate, the former works its magic and she feels good.  It shouldn't be surprising if this person, experiencing a buildup of the acetaldehyde and little or no increase in the latter, continues to drink.  Therefore, the speed at which the body converts alcohol into acetate determines a person's predisposition to alcoholism. p.8

So the body is getting all the good feelings and none of the bad.  Sounds like trouble to me.  Or like getting things on no deposit credit...

I Never Had a Hangover

I never got hangovers for most of my alcoholic career.  It was like burning the candle at both ends without any of the negative feedback, so I could go even harder and longer than most and not worry about the consequences.  It was something to be proud of, like I was a genetic freak for drinking.


Researchers found that 50% of the subjects of a study of alcoholics reported no hangovers within the past year or more and 23% reported that they had never experienced a hangover, despite heavy drinking. P.17

So drinking again is without the feedback, and of course it is like access all areas with no credit limit!  Later in my drinking I did get an awful eternal hangover, which I took was my body screaming back at me that it was clogged with the detritus of twenty years of abuse and was seeking some easy filtering with just water and tea.  Each morning I would wake up and the first hours were Ok because I was most likely still buzzing drunk.  But then, in the afternoon, the credit would fall due and I would be weak and dizzy.

Drug Free -except alcohol

I would tsk tsk with the best of them at others drug fucked escapades.  Plus, I had gone drug free for so long myself, so I wasn't totally 'weak' like them.  And given up cigarettes, so, yeah, i was pretty much a straight arrow except for being a raving alcoholic...
Alcohol is not only a drug capable of causing distortions of perception and memory, but it's also the first drug of choice for most addicted persons.  If not, it's almost always one on which an addict will fall back if nothing else is readily available.  And, it does more damage than all the other drugs combined. P.23.
Just like my sister, who when the supply amphetamine dried up, was always philosophical at the bar, prosthelytizing about 'you can't always get what you want' and other nonsense.  When there was no gear, she'd revert to alcohol in a snap.
And me, when in my drug stage, used to always have some wine in arm's reach.

Loves a drink, but no, she's not alcoholic, always loved a drink.

People often make excuses for other drinkers so the alcoholic tag is kept out of sight.  Like I was described often enough, as great for someone to have along to a dinner party because he brings five bottles of wine (sometimes I'd just bring a case of 12 bottles and have them in the car, and keep going out to get fresh bottles and putting the empty bottles in the car so no one knew how much had been drunk.  Well that's what I thought anyway.)
alcoholics dream of drinking non-addictively while experiencing the unparalleled pleasure from alcohol that only an alcoholic can feel.  However, while they can sometimes drink without observable adverse effects on their behaviours for a period of time, there are few if any reports of instances in which alcoholics have been able to continue to do so for more than a few years. P 28.
I became alcoholic because I had low self esteem
I had low self esteem, or I had such grandiose designs on where I should be, reality was always a deflated let down.  Whatever the case, my completely fucked behaviour whilst drinking soon lowered what esteem I had left so it was low all round, no matter who you asked.

I've stopped drinking a few times now and never had withdrawals.

So what?  Do you expect some earth shattering withdrawal like on trainspotting where you are crying and climbing the walls?  Forget it.  Not that dramatic.
...decades of active alcoholism are usually required before physical dependence occurs and that such dependence is but one symptom of latter stage alcoholism p 30.
Poor environment, upbringing, divorced parents, no pet ponies, etc
I was top of my class all through school, we had international family holidays, I saw Disneyland, I spat off the Eiffel tower, and got lost on a Fiji Cruise before I was twelve - but then my parents divorced.  So I was shipped off to an elite boarding school to finish my education.  And then I landed in law school.  But we never had a pet pony.
Many alcoholics remember their first drinking occasion, while non-alcoholics rarely do. P 42.
I still remember my first drink, Jim Beam bourbon from a 150ml hip flask gulped nervously behind the cinema a few miles from my house.  The burning, the sense of power, the tingling throbbing in my head.  I was an alcoholic right then and there, and the funny thing is, I knew it too.

Moderation

This just doesn't work - it's like giving me an ice cream cone and saying stop when you hit the cone.  You just can't do it as an addict.
I hope I haven't been to harsh here, but there are so many myths and hushed tones when speaking about alcoholism it is best that I explode some crap right here and now so we can all go forward.

Please add your experiences of these myths and how they have shaped your experiences with alcohol.

Reasons to Stay Sober

My daughters are beautiful, clean, innocent, and un-complicated little creatures and it is in no small part due to them that I have stopped being a drunken dickhead.  I just can't stand the thought of me being drunk and bullshitting them ever again.  Or telling them to be quiet or to go away.  Never been so busy as mincing around the house with a globe full of wine in my hand.  Or seeing my daughter pick up an empty bottle and say 'daddy'.

On the weekend, down the beach at the end of winter