Living Without Alcohol

I would like to nominate Mrs D is Going Without as an insightful blog, regularly updated with her personal observations and day to day experiences as she moves away from a life of too much booze.

Mrs D puts her drinking front and center and relates her experiences as a mother, wife and student, and shows how her life has changed since she stopped drinking in the past year.  I like her quiet honesty and genuine realism - it is hard not to be drawn into her unique New Zealand perspective.  Take some time and catch up with where she's at if you get a moment.

Children are the future

In all seriousness, considering the disgraceful nonsense that has virtually ended my family, it is time for a Whitney Houston interlude.



Let me set the scene. 1986. Taffeta, the heady intoxicants of hairspray and maybe some fog-machine smoke, and Whitney's exhausting and indulgent reflections on how the next generation demands our respect and attention. My memory is of my 12 year old School Graduation, where for some reason my mother had me kitted out in a little tuxedo, and I was dancing with girls with braces and pimples and we would sort of just walk away from each other afterwards.

After the show, we wet to the beach with the mothers and the other kids and as we drove down to the beach my other had Whitney belting out her solo on the cassette deck. The words about loving yourself and having a sense of pride were ringing in my ears...

And to think back just last week, my mother having her lawyer send over a four page document featuring utterly false nonsense.

What would Whitney say...

Fences and Themes

Your favorite book or movie is brilliant because you strongly identify with the theme, and it has made an impact on you. And in some way you have made it a part of your worldview, so you carry that story, and the essential nuts and bolts of the theme, with you everyday. It has changed you as a person.

But in the nasty, brutish and instant reality of day to day life, that theme is tested and pulled apart often enough for you to question it. And as life thunders and rolls by each day, you move away from one theme, and closer to another.

One of my motif themes was the inviolability of family, a pretty basic theme, common across all cultures and throughout time. Without some kind of family kinship, you're up against the world by yourself, which doesn't do much good for your chances of survival. Plus, it gets lonely trudging through the snow all by yourself.

So the last few weeks, where my family has folded in on itself for the sake of petty rivalries, is a genuine world-view-changer.

Family, of course, is a lovely ideal, an institution worth fighting for, worth sacrificing for, worth sort of making your basic motivator for almost everything.

Just talking with the in-laws, and staying resolutely on task, (which metaphorically enough is pulling down an old fence and rebuilding a new one) whilst another part of the family seethes and schemes and sees to their twisted agendas. It is a theme shifter.

My old theme was a glorious mash up of Family Ties, the entrepreneurship of Cocktail (and the alcohol stuff was beguiling) and the studied modern non-conformism of Brave New World.

My new, evolving theme is a tinkling stream of clear water, birdsong silence and the pure humanist wisdom of the recovering alcoholic. With plenty of help from an invisible frog chorus of online friends and confidantes.

The old fence was a prison, holding me back from the quiet sober moments of revelation that life unfurls at the most unexpected times.

The new fence is light, thin aluminum, almost imperceptible against the garden, for security and reassurance, but not overt and threatening.

Themes. Lessons. The gist of the story. Not being attached too strongly to a theme, and letting it drift away, and a new theme to flitter in place.

Where's the White Fedora?

There was a police woman talking to my wife in the driveway when I drove up this afternoon. Had a court order from my mother for me to stay away for 12 months and not contact her. If I had my way I would prefer 30 years of staying away. By then she would be 97 and I would be the age she is now.

Last time I saw her, last weeks ago or so, i hugged her and we kissed and i whispered to her that I didn't do what they were accusing me of. And of course I didn't. But how can I categorically prove I didn't? Like a scene from Catch-22.

So we have to meet in court this coming Tuesday. My wife is calm and confident. She maintains we are passing trajectories, us on the way up and my mother and my sisters on the way down. I am learning how to forgive in real time, although I would love to place a withering curse on the sour witches...

It's all about getting the job done around here and staying focused on what we do best - NOT getting sucked into the whirling vortex of family shit that is a complete timesuck with riddles and questions for answers.

It's all about moving forward and being present and, well, just cool. Plus, we went out and bought a white shirt and some taupe trousers for me to wear to court. I looked for a white fedora and perhaps a walking cane (maybe also in white) but there were none. Keep you posted...

The Fish Rots from the Head

Ending is better than mending.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Busy dismantling our warehouse and preparing for a new year working in more flexible arrangements. 

Is such a release to be moving on, with fresh vision and a completely new outlook for the year ahead.  Packing boxes and making all the trips to the recycling center.  There is a bit of grieving and letting go, knowing we are moving on but the general feeling is positive.

Our friends came around on Friday and we shared a fire in the backyard - nothing beats a crackling fire,  sitting on a log, talking.  Friends had wine and cigarettes, but there was never a compulsion or a feeling of awkwardness that I wasn't drinking.  Not from me, but I definitely did recall times where this couple had felt in unfamiliar territory with me drinking ginger beer - like when their wine glasses actually ran empty and I was not constantly refilling it for them.

Meeting friends and not drinking is something that just comes so much more naturally now, we all sort of know I don't drink and it is just what happens.  Like if I was gluten intolerant or diabetic I guess - there is the certain 'otherness' about not drinking that can throw people who only remember you as a drinker at first. 

Like the old ideas that people who don't drink are less fun, or less open to risk taking, or simply dull.  That is simply not true - it is quite clear that at  "three quarter time" of the drinking session, everyone else tends to get sloppy, less able to clearly share what they are thinking and just plain sleepy - whilst sober me is pinging away on fresh air and just enjoying the moment.

The Huxley snatch at the beginning of the post is about moving on, how sometimes, dead things should be left to rot.  There is no point digging up a rotting corpse and poking a stick up it's butt - then to smile and nod and pretend it's not a flyblown, fetid tangle of gristle. 

Just leave it in the ground to do it's thing with the worms and all that.  That is my relationship with certain family members, and I'm OK with that.  All is forgiven and the cycle just has to take it's course.  I have stopped poking the stick and waving fly spray and pretending.

From here, it's all about keeping the gratitude and being ever mindful that the fish rots from the head.

So let's all keep caring for what goes on in our heads.  Every thought, every feeling turned into action, has an impact.  So keep a measure of restraint and discipline with what you think, and breathe before you speak.

January

I don't work in January. Just don't schedule any work, but have some vague plans for building stuff around the house, all the while knowing my real goal is to just drink myself into oblivion everyday. Get up hungover, slurp some wine or have a beer down the back where no one can see, and try to keep that buzz going all day without stumbling or talking shit. Walk the tightrope, until the afternoon when I can 'officially' be half drunk and be seen prancing around with a wineglass and purple teeth.

Well that's what used to happen, anyway.

So January 2012 is the first sober one. I'm prepared - I had six cubic meters of river rock and gravel delivered on my driveway (just before Christmas) so I can spend the mornings shovelling and wheel-barrowing and placing the rocks in the garden. Most of it is already done, and it has been a great way to get outdoors before the heat sets in and be productive.

So next is the fence, and building the new home office. And you must agree it quickly gets boring writing/reading a post cataloging my work for the month. But you get the picture.

Something about being productive and focused - 'sitting sober' is not a holiday for me.