As Good as it Gets

"When you've given up the drink,

And those nasty cigarettes,

Now I leave the party early, at least with no regrets,

I watch the sun as it comes up, I watch it as it sets,

Yeah, this is as good as it gets"

Just a short one tonight. With apologies to Colin Hay.

I used to hear this one on the radio a couple of years back when I was full on drinking and it sounded like my kind of sobriety.  Simple, outdoorsy, using your body, and an honest clarity.

"I like swimming in the sea...

Two Bite Test

You're sitting in a restaurant - you've just taken up your knife and fork and a couple of bites from your main course to your lips - and the waitstaff hovers over.

"Everything OK?" She smiles.

You have a mouthful and most likely nod and smile and look towards your date for approval - she nods too.

"Great" the waitstaff nods too, "Let's know if you need anything.." and she drifts away.

So today the guy on the radio said that this interchange was formally acknowledging that the meal was satisfactory for consumption and that you would fulfill your obligation to make payment without complaint.

He called it the 'two bite test'

I thought of my unspoken, implied contract as an alcoholic - and how I was beguiled into believing the gentle fantasy of 'getting towards drunk' was a promise of happiness and, quite possibly, happiness plus. Or Super Happiness. Like getting an ice cream, but a double, or instead of a standard holiday, a first class holiday.

Like there was a way to upgrade happiness to a higher and even more thrilling and satisfying emotion.
Or to intensify moments like relaxing Sunday afternoons to a higher plane "Wouldn't it be great to have a beer now?" or other times "Imagine watching this stoned?" - Always thinking that the spice of drugs or alcohol would be just what was needed to add that something extra to the experience.

And it sort of worked - fuck, I had some awesome times and no one can take them away from me - but as a way of life, it just is unsustainable.

So here I am, unplugged, raw and living it real.

I've taken the two bites of sobriety and nodded to the waitstaff that yes, it is fine, and I am ready to proceed.

Curse of Expectation

When I was a kid they had high expectations for me. You probably know the stereotype; immigrant Irish, thick-fingered father and doting, over protective mother? I showed potential and studied harder than the other kids and was groomed for university and a professional career. Even got academic entry to a boarding school. Then won a place in law school.

Before long, I allowed my preference for drinking and drugs to flourish and soon after allowed depression to fester. I chose not to pursue my degrees. I stepped off of the career conveyor belt into the unknown.

Now, at 37 and 218 days into sobriety, I am able to take stock of where I am at and take full responsibility for my life, and the decisions I have made. It is just where I am at. And it feels pretty fucking good!

But still, there are times when it feels like I should have been something else or that my life is not as good as it might have been. Like I have somehow not lived up to expectation. Expectations of family and peers - that I should have turned out as some sort of career professional at some point. And that any shortcomings or misgivings in my life are a result of that. Like I cannot go back and change what I decided, but that the present situation all stems back to those fateful decisions.

Expectations can be a curse you live with, popping up in the back of your mind at the worst possible times for the rest of your life. Like even today, when a certain thing happens in my business life I can think to myself about what I could have been or what I am not and criticize myself for it. Like the wishes and urging of others was right and what I knew I wanted for myself was wrong.

It is a terrible cancer of self-doubt and analysis paralysis. I catch myself thinking a key moment in my university career over and again as though it is chiselled in stone. The point where, when I was simply exhausted and strung out from drink and drugs and I made the walk to the building to withdraw from the courses.

It is a curse of failure and missing out and not getting the job done. And although it truly was the right decision, and has led me to discover so much about myself, it lingers as a black curse over me. The curse of expectation. Of unfulfilled dreams of others and all that shit.

So my recovery, and my sobriety is to finally settle that curse. To extinguish it and eradicate it from my mental library. It is no longer a key feature of my life montage. It is an episode, or a chapter, for sure, but it not the defining moment.

The curse is now lifted.

Old Paperbacks

I bought The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was a teenager fumbling through a secondhand bookshop.  It was probably midwinter and I was probably using money I didn't really have before I would scurry back to my flat and read and drink and smoke rolled cigarettes.  There is something about the title that is enough - I never really finished the book - but I can say I have picked it up many times and read parts of it, or it appears on my bedside table at times.

“Next to music beer was best.”

Carson McCullers is the classic alcoholic writer.  Dying at 50.  An androgynous name.  Titles like The Ballard of the Sad Cafe.  Stories about 'the south' and 'mutes' and 'blacks' and 'loneliness'.

“I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - 

but just what this real want was she did not know.”

I would sit and read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as if it would reveal something to me.  But nothing happened.  What I needed was to get out and travel and live and fall in love and get lost and somehow find myself.  Instead of sitting on a old mattress reading a musty yellow paperback.  Smoking and drinking and nursing my depression.

"The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone."

Drinking was a real prop in those lonely days - a reason to go somewhere, to be somewhere and to motivate me to work.  Sad, really.  There should be something profound here, but all I can really share is that it was a way to spend the time and grow and experience towards my being sober.  As though everything that happened up to this point was all part of the journey of becoming sober.

And not wasting that experience equity - it is far too valuable and hard earned to be simply dismissed as time wasted getting wasted.  It is common to all addicts - thrashing against the addiction, stretching it, bending it, pulling away, tearing it up, embracing it - over the years we have all done all of these with our addictions. 

Now, let's hope with sustained vigilance I have arrived at some sort of steady truce, and silent understanding that drinking is an awesome ocean that needs respect.  And I am powerless and helpless in it. So I don't dare even dip my toe.  Just watch from the shore, and watch others surf knowing I can only sink.

"When a person knows and can't make the others understand,
what does he do?"

He is patient and shares his musings in a blog, that's what...

Your Story - Your Turn

What's your story with drinking?
Share some of your stories here, anonymously if you wish, and take the five question quiz.  You can answer as long or as short as you wish, and I'll post all the interviews here so people can read them for all eternity.

1.  Have you stopped drinking? 

2.  How long ago? 

3.  What was the final straw?

4.  How are you feeling right now?

5.  What works for you staying sober?

As you can see the questions are very brief and give you as much room to move as you need - maybe a short answer, maybe a longer answer.  It is your choice and your answer will reflect what you feel/ think as much as you wish.  I will send you a copy before I publish so you can proofread.
Thanks
or you can email here...

Guilty of being Grateful

Walked 10km along the beach today, had a swim with the girls, then went to a cafe for lunch before plopping the girls asleep into their rooms by 1pm.  Perfect weather - 27C, gentle sea breeze, girls in great spirits, simply a beautiful experience all round.

I looked at the girls, eating fish and chips and slurping chocolate milk and caught myself almost repeating something my father would have said at a moment like this.  A 'perfect moment' where everything was calm, peaceful and we had experienced a lovely day.

My father would have said something like "You kids don't know how lucky you are," and shaking his head slowly as he looked over at my mother, "when I was your age we used to get fish and chips on special occasions."  It was his way of teaching grateful.

One time he even said "You kids don't even know what it's like to be hungry - to be really hungry." As if we were meant to make sense of what he was trying to convey.  Of his feeling of hopelessness and fear as a kid with a drunken father who had blown his wage the afternoon he got paid.

It was a curious situation, sitting after a meal with a glowing, satisfied feeling and then the sharp jolt of guilt that came with not knowing how lucky we were.  It took me a while to unhinge the idea of guilt and allow myself the sublime pleasure of feeling quietly grateful instead.

Going Sideways

Jack: Just don't give up, alright? You're gonna make it.
Miles: Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. I'am thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.
Jack: See? Right there. Just what you just said. That is beautiful. 'A smudge of excrement... surging out to sea.'
Miles: Yeah.
Jack: I could never write that.
Miles: Neither could I, actually. I think it's Bukowski.

from Sideways (2004)

Now I loved that movie when I was drinking. 

It was about how sometimes life comes and smacks you in the face even when you just want to go on drinking and feeling sorry for yourself. 

One of those romantic-drunk movies where the hopeless drunk somehow struggles through and it doesn't all end as a complete and utter tragedy, but near enough. 

I used to see life like that - as though we were all trapped in this spinning existential vortex where we were all victims of our desires and that there was not much we could do about it.  So getting drunk was a natural and perfectly logical thing to do - hell, we could all be dead tomorrow or something like that.  And anyway, it all doesn't matter, so who gives a shit?  Let's drink!

...---==*^*==---...

Now, sober 200+ days and working on myself, I don't see life as a sad tragedy where I stumble from one disaster to the next, a victim of circumstance or birth or geography or whatever, endlessly pushing it uphill like Sisyphus.  No, I can take responsibility and make positive, affirmative steps that can change my world. 

From the banal basics like getting a plumber to change the cisterns so they don't leak (took five years drinking for no action, five months sober to make the call and just three hours to actually fix). 

Or stopping my incessant mind chatter on negative ancient history and changing the playlist. 

So half my life may be over,
But I do have something to show for it,
And I'd love to share it with you.

There's Something About Friday

Fridays are different for some reason.
You can drink on a Friday as though it is a sport and talk of drinks in terms of scoring points or kicking goals. You can borrow a drink, or give away drink - the whole drinking culture has it's own economy.

Every Friday.
You can drink a days wages, stay out and stumble home at some hour having forgotten half the night.
And spend Saturday morning gulping water and swallowing tablets.

Every Friday still has the tantalizing open ended promise of drinking. And I don't say no anymore. I just know.
Just know it will have some broke, soggy ending with me being embarrassing...

Just like There's Something About Mary is a comedy, take a look at this trailer re-cut to be a thriller. 

Being Normal

Two ears, one mouth - right? 

Part of being a member of the blogging community means I read a lot of other blogs and get close to other people's thoughts and musings by reading through their blogs. 
It is great being able to post here and have a loyal reader base who leave comments and follow where I'm at in my own journey - but it is even more important to be out there reading and leaving meaningful and insightful commentary on other people's blogs.

So I've tried to stick with the rule of leaving two comments out there for every post I write - that way I am giving what most bloggers want - some FEEDBACK for fucksake (it can be shockingly lonely poring over a post for hours, not self censoring your most private revelations and then - once you publish it and put it out there, there is like 0 comments sitting there after a few days.  Absolutely deafening who-gives-a-shit-silence)

Then there's being an alcoholic blogger as another sort of massive room silencer - you can see me popping up in a crafty-mother-frugality blog or a killer-abs-guy-doing-extreme-exercises blog and the readers going who is this stupid drunk?  Is he drunk when he wrote that or what?

Anyway, there are some other blogs out there and I would like to share with you a recent comment I left.  It was just fitting and I somehow scraped it out of the ether and it is - three great letters - apt.

This is the comment

Albert Camus noted  "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
Addiction is something that privately curses you until you overcome it.
It is always devastating to see someone worn down by addiction.
Here's for all those struggling to survive with all sorts of addictions and hoping they can come over to sobriety and see it's not such a bad place.

You can read the post here

Globally Grateful

I work with crazy people, all the time.  Not crazy as in zany or plain stupid - the real motherfucking crazy people - like dual diagnosis challenging behavior types with intellectual disabilities and psychosis.  Rainbow tic tac boxes full of medication tablets and inch thick behavior plans and one on one monitoring and - you get the picture.  It can be, as the name suggests, fucking challenging.  Like about three hours ago.

The Waiting Game

Right now he is lying asleep, dozing fitfully with the obligatory snail's sliver of silver dribble on the corner of his mouth.  And I am cowed over the laptop, typing this in the darkened kitchen.  Last night just getting him to sleep was a test of my patience, my thresholds, my mindfulness.  He has demolished rooms and furniture with his strong arms and, even though he is deaf, blind and unable to speak, he can communicate in his own overt way how he is feeling.

And the consensus is he is terrified.  Living with a catalog of diagnoses, feeling a parade of fumbling support workers and staff each try their particular style of care, and all the while being effectively de-sensitised to it through his crippling disabilities.  His receptive senses are restricted to his soft fingers, and his feel of vibrations and surfaces.

So it is hardly surprising he gets frustrated and struggles to have his needs met.  And as a young man he has a volatile temper and the vigour and strength to communicate it in his own special way.  So last night (or three hours ago) from 1230am until 0345am, I was there, next to him, living his private, special needs hell.  And it is a real test of character and endurance to sit with him whilst he 'settles' into his drug induced sleep.

If we learn to open our hearts,
anyone, including the people who drive us crazy,
can be our teacher.
Pema Chodron

Not sure what I have learned tonight.  But I am sure I have seen just how all consuming and intense and overwhelming our minds can be, and how learning to settle the noise in our heads is half the challenge of this life.  No matter how often I see it, there is always a moment of mindfulness, a moment of reflection when the window is open for us to be grateful for some very simple things.  Like not living with an intellectual disability.

Maybe I did learn to appreciate and be globally grateful my daughters are healthy, strong willed, inquisitive little monkeys and that I feel immense gratitude for their simple health and, dare I say it, normality.

To Sydney and Back

I had a big delivery to Sydney in the middle of the CBD yesterday.  It is a challenge parking my black van somewhere and piling out gourmet baskets - especially when it is raining.  And the sombre, expressionless faces of all the business types waiting at traffic lights in the rain - always reminds of why I live where I live.

Sustainability is all about living within our limits and being mindful of what we consume, which is something I have been leaning towards over on my other blog Merewether Life.  I write about living simply by the beach and having chickens and gardens and all that.  Sitting in my garden is a profound pleasure of mine.

My Garden, (you can see my bedroom window)

So where is this heading?  As I drove around the city traffic, driving like all the other feckless, reckless dirty van drivers, I thought how unsustainable most of the inner city lifestyles are - being dependent on an employer, on transport, having no way of growing much for yourself, or being able to walk in nature.  This makes you disconnected from the simple ebbs and flows of life. And when I was disconnected I would find myself seeking the most convenient source of connectedness - alcohol.

And how there are pubs on every city block.  And watching the drinkers tumble out for a cigarette, 10am, the tingle of alcohol seeping through their veins like spidery rootlets of numbness.  And how I was always 'stopping by' or 'popping in' or 'just going over to' and having that first drink again and again at a half dozen pubs across the city by lunchtime.  Treading into the vinegar-carpet darkness and asking a different bartender for a beer as though it was insignificant, or minor, or inconsequential - 'just a schooner of VB'

And back in the traffic, flowing with the ebb and pause, the van my shuttle, zig zagging through the other cars, stopping, starting, homeward bound.  The city morning yawning, baring it's teeth and me flitting by, like a bird on a crocodile and safely home and sober...

Secondhand Shops

At the counter of a second hand clothing store and the too-skinny, (bony-skinny-like-a-drug-addict) girl with a baby on her hip says "...and I can't drive, and my boyfriend doesn't have a license, so we were just thinking..."
And she looks at the volunteer staff, two grey haired ladies with floral aprons, biting their lips and looking at each other like they'd heard versions of this story a thousand times before.

"Um, we don't drive either," One of the ladies finally says, "So we can't really help you" and shrugs her shoulders.
The skinny girl, almost as though she expected to be turned down, shrugs too, "Thanks anyway" she says without looking back, out onto the street.

I raised my eyebrows in that smug middle class way that only us smug mortgaged middle class middle manager types can do, and snorted a smile,
"Just after a Pirate shirt if there is such a thing?' I said, making it obvious I was not in the store for real, just as a lark, as an expedition into the secondhand world.  Doing the quotation marks with index and middle fingers in the air when I said pirate, like it was all terribly au fait and de rigeur and all that mock well to do bullshit.

_--**8**--_

It is no secret round here that but for some exceptional good luck and sheer hard work I could quite easily have been 'the boyfriend waiting outside' and my secondhand life could be just plain bald faced reality. 
It is such a load of bullshit that I can contrive to be 'normal' and expect to be treated differently from those so obviously still in the midst of addictions.
Is this why I can't go to AA meetings yet - becuse I have this Hollywood style concept where the room is full of either down and outs or failed salesmen types, or hookers? 

It is such a convenient ruse to hide behind the dignity and respect of having some sort of status and clinging to it when in situations like that.
But deep down I have a curious sympathy for the pathetic addict, and how, in the throes of addiction, it really is possible to just drink shit alcohol sitting in the rain at a bus stop. 
And feel as though the present was somehow bearable, because I was drunk.

In Depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future,
and the present as the present no longer exists at all

 Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon.