Song of the Day: "The Polynesian"

A column about music, and about how the music informs our lives. Today's author is Joe. See the previous songs HERE.

"The Polynesian"

Pkew Pkew Pkew

from Optimal Lifestyles

2019

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of my final drink. March 15th is the day I celebrate sobriety, even though I wasn't sober on March 15, 2023. It was when I made the decision to quit, a decision that somehow stuck, for at least three years now. I made that decision while kinda drunk, but not while drinking. I got drunk and then made the decision when I was coming down off the high of inebriation. And then, of course, reaffirmed that decision in the cold dawn of the next morning.

So I celebrate that decision every March 15th, the anniversary of my last drinking binge. Today is March 14th, however, and so beyond celebrating Pi Day, and beyond celebrating Pam's birthday a few days early, I am celebrating, uh, the anniversary of my second-to-last binge, I guess? I know that one too. I finished up my work for the day at like 11 AM, and instead of taking the rest of the day off, maybe spending a little time with the family or whatever, I chose to saunter down to the local watering hole (McGillin's) and order me up a few pitchers of their finest Rolling Rock. And I sat there at the bar by myself, drinking, thinking, and, yes, writing a Record Club album review.

Which was a weird thing to do (the drinking alone thing, not the review-writing, which is never weird and always normal no matter what the circumstances are). Weird, but also... enjoyable. I can safely admit that at this point. It was enjoyable and I liked doing it. I liked having little adventures by myself, going to a bar, drinking, chatting with the bartender a bit maybe, but mostly just observing, taking in the world around me. I was alone but I was participating in a ritual, and that made me feel good. It made me feel like I was a part of something. And the drunker I got, the more I could convince myself that I was a part of something special, and that made me feel even better.

But still weird, right? I keep using the word "weird," both in this blog post and in life in general, and I need to confirm for you now that I am using it in a positive way. "Weird" as a compliment, and as a goal. I want my life to be weird. I see that as a good thing. Weird is a synonym for exciting. Weird is an antonym for boring, and boring is a mortal sin in my eyes. I can't make it through this life while being bored.

The rub is that I also can't seem to make it through this life if I have another sip of alcohol ever again. The problem, therefore, is that I can no longer rely on alcohol to make life weird. And damn, dude, I really did lean on that shit for so fucking long. I needed the weird and I used alcohol to get there for approximately eighteen years and ten days. I am sincerely thankful for all the crazy, stupid, weird-ass shit that happened to me (or because of me) while I was drinking. Anything from getting blackout at McNally's to going crazy on the dancefloor at my wedding to, yeah, honestly just sitting at the bar by myself and soaking in the world around me. All of it was weird. All of it occurred with a little help from my former friend.

I don't have that anymore. Three years in, I'm not yearning for the alcohol anymore. But I still yearn for life to be weird. I couldn't do that my first year because I was just spending so much physical energy trying to hold on tight and make it through. I didn't do that my second year because I was just spending so much mental energy trying to get my emotions in order and figure out how I could plan for future with such a large hole in my psyche. So the task of my third year of sobriety was to figure out how to get weird.

I think I made great strides in this task, and I'm going to attempt to talk about it now. It's something I've mostly avoided, and at most barely hinted at over the last year of blogging, but I'm going to now make an effort to write about it somehow. Because it's important to me for you to know my truth, as uncomfortable as that truth sometimes is for me and for you. This, despite hearing a really cool quote recently that resonated with me in my predicament re: truth-seeking and truth-spouting. Joni Mitchell, once upon a time, played Blue for Kris Kristofferson, and Kristofferson, upon hearing it, told Mitchell "God, Joan, save something of yourself." Kristofferson is the devil on my shoulder, telling me that I don't need to share everything, that I can keep some things to myself. I brush him off my shoulder and turn to the Joni Mitchell angel on the other shoulder and look to her for the courage to lay it all bare, tell my truth, get it out there, cleanse and become anew.

Instead of getting weird with alcohol, I've been getting weird with sex. It's a safer thing to explore because I am not addicted to sex like I was with alcohol or would be with drugs and definitely am currently with food. It's safe because I'm not addicted and yet when I participate in the act, it feels great. But not great in a way that I'm making bad decisions because of how great it feels. I am in control of my pleasure, unlike I was during all those manic highs of binge drinking. I feel uncomfortable talking about it this way, now that I'm writing it out. Too clinical, not weird enough. Let me not sell the weirdness of my experiences short.

I'm also pretty hesitant to talk in lush details because this is not a solo adventure (well, it sometimes is, but I'll spare you those details). There are other people involved. Sex often requires a partner or partners to complete the widest range of acts under its umbrella. But at the same time, I don't want to blow up anybody's shit on this blog, which is public but in the least public sense (mainly that it's available to everyone but chosen to be read by very few, especially on a Saturday like today, especially underneath the feint of a Song of the Day header). So I'm not going to do that.

But I have been exploring ethical non-monogamy for over a year now, which means that I am in a loving relationship with a beautiful woman but that we define our physical relationship as not necessarily between just the two of us. Having a solid relationship with lots of excellent communication with the person I married is not WEIRD, and so this is not really relevant to the blog post's purpose, I think. It was important to note for the record, though. Always is. Love is awesome. I've found love and I hold onto love and when I talk about getting weird and finding excitement in the weird corners of my existence, I have love as a foundation, as a home base to return to.

I've explored some weird shit with my partner. But the ethical non-monogamy has allowed me to meet other people, some of whom I'd consider FWBs (friends with benefits), some just friends, and with my friends and FWBs I've also explored some weirder shit. Gone places, done things, ya know what I mean. I like how it's afforded me the opportunity to build friendships that don't look like friendships I'm familiar with, or friendships that most people I know are familiar with, and in the new, I find the weird. 

I have a good life, and I had a good life before I started to explore sex in weirder ways. What's cool about sex inside and outside of the home is that it can get weird in good ways but never overwhelming ways. Like, it felt like drinking overtook my life for a while there. Sex is just a little something extra, something cool to tack onto an already good life. It weaves its way through the gaps in my life, making it feel fuller—in how it strengthens my relationship at home, in how it allows other relationships to grow, in how it addresses certain needs and makes everything feel more content. It's not medicine, because nothing was wrong. It's more like a vaccine, I guess. I stave off the boredom for another day.

It should probably be acknowledged that I feel comfortable exploring the weird (the good weird) because I don't very often feel the weird (the bad weird). I can distinguish between the two, which I suppose is not a distinction that some people are capable of making. This blog post is a great example of what I'm talking about. Do I want to write about the weird-ass shit that I got up to at the sex club? Absolutely. But I'm holding back, because I'm acknowledging that other people probably find it weird, the bad weird. That's why I'm not going around talking about all this too often, because I know for a fact that other people find it weird. I've tried to talk about it with a few monogamous friends, and on at least half of their faces, I can tell that they think that this is the bad weird. And so I hold back my truth, because I don't want other people to feel uncomfortable with the weird. We just see weird differently. Which is fine! The need for me to reveal my truth is not so strong that I'm going to make people feel bad over it!

Still, I've been thinking lately that it might be to my overall benefit to start being a little more open and honest about my lifestyle choices, and the ways that I get weird. First of all, because if you are still my friend at this point in my life, then that is a choice based on the fact that I like you and care about you a lot, and want you to know who I am and what I believe and how I spend my life. Second, because I keep looking back at the last time I was getting weird, with the drinking, and how closely I guarded so much of that weirdness, which ultimately led to a downfall. I loved getting weird with drinking so much that I did it in secret too, and it's the secret that makes me ashamed. I don't want to keep things from the people I care about. I want you to know me, in the same way that I desire to know about you.

So this is what I'm thinking about this weekend, as I celebrate another year of hard-earned sobriety. I'm thinking about all the ways I'm coping with the loss of that part of my life that I cherished for so long. One of the best ways I've been coping is to feel the way I felt during my best drinking days, but in a much healthier fashion. I have determined that I can still get weird without drinking. It's just a matter of finding out how. This was a good year in finding the weird again.

Thirsty Thursday: Two Years

This past Saturday, we went to the Philadelphia Zoo. We're members (my grandmom gets the kids the family membership for Christmas every year), so it's a good day for doing something cheap. You don't have to pay for tickets or parking if you're a member, and if you bring your own food and drink, then you theoretically don't have to spend money on anything except gas. So that's what we did. It was a nice day. We saw some animals. The kids had fun and whined and laughed and all that stuff.

On the day we were there, the zoo was having their annual "Whiskey Walk." It was just something happening in the background to our experience. Groups of young adults clutching tiny cups half-filled with amber liquids, enjoying the sights and sounds just like we were. There was the occasional line to push the stroller around, but other than that, whatever, no big deal, let the whiskey people have their fun. 

Except it kind of bothered me, if I'm being honest. Not just because whiskey was always my least favorite liquor by a rather large margin. Not even because the activity made the zoo more crowded, even though I suppose it technically did. It just... I guess it was jealousy, if I'm being honest. I need to be honest, always and forever about this whole fucking drinking thing, fully and completely honest, and here is my honest truth: I was jealous. So let's unpack that.

I'm not the only one with a problem. I'm not the only alcoholic walking around sober and sad on this planet. I know this. But whenever I look around at large masses of people holding tiny cups of whiskey, I usually assume the following: none of these people have a problem. That's what I'm jealous of. I'm jealous of the type of person who can just be like, alright, today I'm going to the zoo and I'm gonna try all the whiskeys that they have, and it'll be a nice relaxing day, and maybe I'll go home just a tiny bit tipsy and I'll eat a hearty dinner and sleep it off and be ready for church the next day. If you don't have a problem, that's a nice day. I actually ran into a friend and her partner and they were doing the Whiskey Walk. They seemed happy. It was just something they were doing. It wasn't some fucking existential crisis in which whiskey represents their ultimate downfall or some bullshit like that. Just a little cup of warm liquid that makes you feel good in small doses.

The weirdest part about my jealousy is that I know now, and absolutely would have known back then, that something like the Philadelphia Zoo's Whiskey Walk was absolutely, positively not for me. As a sober person, I would've hated it because I don't drink, but as a drinker, I would've hated the Whiskey Walk too. But not even just because I didn't like drinking whiskey. But also the price, and the pain in the ass it would have been to wait in line just for a little bit of alcohol. Like, just imagine me waiting in like hopping on one foot and then the other and pacing around and complaining like FUCK I need another fucking DRINK what the fuck are we even DOING here we could be at home doing shots for FREE and etc. etc. etc.

It wouldn't be efficient drinking. That's what I specialized in. I knew how to get drunk quickly. It's more than just grabbing a bottle and drinking fast. It's more about formulating a plan that would be conducive to the drinking. Drinking whiskey and blacking out is sad. Having a party and gathering friends and doing the legwork and convincing everyone else to drink too and posting event details and greeting guests and organizing games and making small talk and making deep talk and gleefully cleaning up the mess while I'm coming down off my high, that was fun, and not sad at all. Constructing my life in that way so that I could do all those things all the time and continually justify the act of having Too Much Fun was great until it wasn't. But you see how I was able to justify it for so long, by making room for maximum contexts in which I could get maximum drunk under the banner of "maximum fun." That's what I mean by "efficient." The zoo's Whiskey Walk wouldn't have been like that, and I wouldn't have had fun.

So I was jealous that people could have fun like that, is basically what I'm trying to say here. It wouldn't have been fun for me and I felt so strongly about it not being fun that I went into overdrive trying to prove that it wouldn't have been fun, so much so that I was forced to strip away the opportunity to even try it at all. In a different life, I don't have the disease, and I'm comfortable sipping small sips, and I'm walking around the zoo with my family and my tiny cups of amber liquid, and we're laughing at the cheetah coughing up a hairball just like our pet cat Lulu does, and I'm sipping and we're smiling and the monkeys are swinging from rope to rope and the snakes slither along the glass to say hi and I'm just trying out the new Tullamore Dew because it's just something nice to do, ya know, with the family. But instead I'm walking around with a clear head and a heavy heart and I'm feeling that cold blackness of jealousy over some fucking drink I never liked in the first place.

This is the feeling that I've felt from the beginning. It's been exactly two years this Saturday, and it's lessened in that time, but it's never really gone away, and I fear it never will. It's not temptation, that shit is long gone. It's not regret, because I've made mistakes but I've done my best to fix them, and made peace with the ones I can't fix. It's just a small little pang of sadness that I get when I stop to think about it, the absence of drinking, and the wall I've constructed to keep myself out of harm's way. I know I can't drink and I think I never will again, but I still hate myself sometimes for getting to this point. I was just so fucking stupid to push it so hard. It was unnecessary. I don't know why I had to burn out like that. I knew it was happening and I fucking did it anyway. I couldn't have just, ya know, taken it easy a little bit? I knew for so long that I had a finite number of drinks within me but still I kept drinking faster and faster. It's like only have one tank of gas and then pushing the pedal down when it hits E. It doesn't make any sense. I could've just had a few beers here and there. I could've gotten tipsy on a quiet Saturday evening with friends. I could've sipped whiskey at the Big Cat Falls exhibit. Don't you see what I pissed away? Nothing important, but also everything.

I allowed myself one paragraph of histrionics here in this blog post. Sorry about that. I had to do it though. Only one paragraph, because it really isn't that big of a deal. It only feels like a big deal during those small, intense, and rare moments that it hits me. The dark thought hits me as I open the fridge and see the tall colorful can of high-intensity locally brewed ale and I'm hit with the cycle of "What if...?" and then the immediate playing forward of the tapes and imagining the carnage and destruction that would come to my life if I cracked that can and the act of saying no makes me feel so goddamn sad because it's my fault that I have to say no in the first place, and grieve once more all the times that I could've had but lost because of my own stupid actions, and have to once again face a future in which I feel everything and get numb to nothing and have no aid and feel awkward and feel out of place and have to try really really hard to get comfortable and then just locked out from certain things and freak out about others and feel embarrassed about everything because I'm the fucking jerkoff who put myself in this position and I'm the fucking jerkoff who chose sobriety even though it's hard and I hate it.

Okay, sorry, there's another paragraph of histrionics for you. Whoops. All that happens in a moment, all those dark feelings in a dense little ball and it rolls around in my brain for just a single, solitary moment, and then... I just let it float away. The moment passes. It comes back to me that I didn't have a choice, that it's my fault but that it's also my fault that I'm alive, that that's a good thing, that there actually was a choice except that choice was either get sober or die and I chose correctly and I am ultimately happy with that. 99.99% of my life consists of moments that feel this way—happy, content, proud, at the very least, I dunno, manageable I guess? But that other 0.01% has happened over the past two years and it'll continue to happen for the time being. And the pain and sorrow in those tiny, fleeting moments is almost too much to bear.

But not, at the end of the day, too much to bear, or else I'd just start drinking again. I can bear it. I can bear sobriety. I've been doing it and I don't know why an annoying pesky little ten seconds per week in which I hate my life would ever be enough to change any of that. And, crucially, if it does, then I know I have people to talk to about it before I take a sip, so there's that.

I'm gonna tell you about something kinda fucked up that happened to me during my second full year of sobriety. It's gonna look like I'm talking shit or am holding a grudge or something, but I'm not, and if I tell this short anecdote, then I need you to have grace and patience and forgiveness for the other person in this story, because I'm not telling the story to make him look like a villain. I'm just telling it because it's part of my story.

Last summer, we were at the fourth annual M******* family vacation with Pam's family. We traditionally spend a lot of around the table at the end of the night just talking shit and letting my in-laws bicker and all that. I've already written about this vacation week in the Thirsty Thursday column. I can confirm that this past summer was even better, in sobriety. I feel more comfortable around that table, now that I am of sound mind. I feel like the beer-addled mind of drunk Joe would get agitated very easily, and would be prone to stating my position in the form of drunkenly yelling. Heated discussions can be an art if you have a clear mind and conscience and are performed in good faith and cheer.

Anyways, one night, my father-in-law was asking about my sobriety, and not necessarily in a kind way. Which is fine. I actually welcome anyone who doesn't feel like pussyfooting around the issue. But at the end of the night, he points his finger at me and say something along the lines of: "I guarantee you this: you will drink again in your life. It might not be while I'm alive, but I'll know if from my grave, and I'll say I told you so. You will have another drink."

Interpret that as you will. I don't really know how I interpret it myself. I know he was pretty drunk when he said it, but saying something like "he just wishes he could be sober like me and is lashing out" lacks humility to a degree that I'm not comfortable considering that explanation. Knowing my father-in-law, if I asked him about his saying this, he would have no idea what the fuck I was talking about. Which probably makes it worse. I alone have to live with being haunted by something someone said to me. 

Am I ever going to drink again? I can say "no" in the here and now and mean it with every fiber of my being, but it can't ever be true, simply because we just don't know the future. I suppose it's slightly ironic that I feel less inclined to drink now that he said it, because a part of my motivation becomes having to "prove someone wrong," which is not healthy if that's my only motivation, but it's not, and so it just strengthens my resolve. I think it's always gonna stick with me, his sentiments, simply because they are my own fears vocalized. That I am proud of two years but that in the grand scope of a life it ain't fucking shit, that I still have a long way to go, that I doubt myself and my resolve over a lifetime. I'm feeling good now but I worry about the long-term future.

But I don't worry that much. Two years is enough to become entrenched in an idea like sobriety. If I gave up now, then it would be like I wasted the last two years of my life, ya know? If I'm gonna drink then I might as well have drank every moment I wanted to drink the past two years. If I drank now then the regrets would instantly stack up way too high. I've made peace with my decision to not drink during the moments I don't want to drink, and if I then drank, even one beer, then I'd be tearing that peace away and stomping on it and lighting it on fire. Just seems stupid to even consider it at this point. I'm in too deep.

When we passed through the entrance gates to the zoo, the attendants were asking to see who was participating in the Whiskey Walk, and all those who were took a slight left and lined up. As we were walking down the main path, I overheard the guy in charge of getting people checked in for the Walk say the following: "All my fellow alcoholics, this way!" I understand that this was just a cheeky way of referring to those who like to drink. I'm not offended in the slightest. But I can tell you that no self-respecting alcoholic is gonna be caught dead sipping tiny cups of liquor out in public for an exorbitant fee. That's just not how we roll. It's either get your own bottle so you can drink at your own pace which is much too quickly and hide some servings in private and do this as many times as you can before you die an early death... or just keep walking, stroll toward the PECO Primate Conservation Center, don't think about it, don't think about it, just live your best goddamn life and be present and be thankful and be okay and let the bad feelings fly into the sky and away from here, just like the 6ABC Zoo Balloon once did, many years ago.

Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 48: Joe

Prompt: "...And now a song you would play if you were trying to end that party"

Selected by Joe

"The Bird"

The Time

Ice Cream Castle, 1984

I seem to be experiencing some writer's block recently with these fucking things. I'm not sure why, generally speaking. Specific to this prompt and the block that I have with it, then I'd probably guess it has something to do with the fact that my overall motivation to "party" these days is at an all-time low. (S-word alert: you have been warned.)

This is to be expected, given the circumstances. It's still kinda sad. It's sad because I used to live for partying. If I'm being honest with myself, then I'd say that I cannot fucking imagine how a party might function without alcohol. It's the engine that keeps those things running. Social lubricant. I get it. I was there. I used to love parties because I could get a little or a lot drunk and feel at ease around friends and strangers alike. More often than not, those strangers would become friends by the end of the night. Temporary friends, maybe, but friends nonetheless. Beer was a conduit for creating connections to your fellow human beings. I loved that shit.

I can't do it without the alcohol. I just can't. Maybe I will eventually, but I can't right now. Over 400 days of sobriety and there hasn't been a single party that I've walked away from with those same fluttery feel-good can't-miss feelings that I used to feel under the haze. I just feel awkward, and I walk away feeling exhausted for even trying.

Back in October, my oldest kid got invited to a friend's Halloween party, and all the parents were there too, so it was a lot of mingling with other moms and dads while the kids ran amok throughout the backyard. And man... I did not do well at all. Either people could smell the sober on me, or I just never noticed how people tend to avoid people they don't know while I was drunk. Or I really am the most awkward person in the room. Or no one knows how to make friends with other adults post-COVID. Or it's just me. I don't know. Everyone was very nice and very cold. I felt like Clark Kent trying to see through a can of lead paint.

I don't actually think anyone cares. I'm not self-centered enough to think that anyone sincerely thought "who is the awkward guy in the corner?" 99.99% chance no one noticed me at all, which is fine. I just wish there was a way to make it known that I am newly sober and struggling with the social aspect around strangers and somehow use that as an icebreaker without sounding like an incredibly annoying sober person shoving his sobriety in non-sober people's faces.

I also wish that maybe I would have used my late-teenage years to develop a better social personality outside of inebriation. I did this to myself, after all. Fucked myself over in the long run. In party situations, I became one type of person, and I was that person solely because of the BAC level, and once you take that away, I'm left with nothing, just a void where the interesting person used to be (interesting in good ways and bad, sure, but interesting nonetheless). That was pretty stupid of me! Whoops!

Now I know what you're gonna say. You, the reader of this blog post on this blog, are going to say something along the lines of "I don't feel that way about you" or "I still like hanging out with you whether you are drunk or sober" or anything along those lines. Two points here. One: thank you. I appreciate that. But two: the fact that you're my friend (as I can't imagine too many strangers are currently reading this blog right now) means that you're not really who I'm talking about. But let's take a minute to talk about that instead.

Not party, but "party." The friend gathering. The hangout. The social time spent with people you already know. Those nights during the past 400 nights that I've spent hanging out with you. Those have still been fun. I feel comfortable with my friends, still, thank christ. Some minor readjustments, but all in all, satisfactory. If I'm outside the home and chilling with other adults and I know all of them and have been friends with them for years or sometimes even decades, then I'm still walking away with good feelings and contentment. This, despite the fact that I shaped these friendships in my life with the help of alcohol originally. You stay friends with someone long enough and the context kinda just falls away, and you end up being friends in a vacuum too. That's been helpful to me, to know that I can chill at a bar around the small table in the back, or go to a book club, or shoot the shit at a quick lunch in the city, and still feel comfortable in my own skin, without the need for alcohol.

The only thing missing in those and other social situations is that feeling like anything could happen. That was a good thing about parties (with alcohol), the memories of those moments when something fucking crazy happens, intentionally or unintentionally, and even the days and weeks afterward, there's this afterglow of "I cannot fucking BELIEVE that happened." I loved those moments, and I cherish them, and they just don't happen anymore. I mean, that's a side effect of growing up, probably. I also think that maybe the increase in alcohol intake that I experienced and indulged in during the two or three years leading up to sobriety was a subconscious reaction to the absence of those moments, as if drinking even more was going to bring them back.

I used to throw a lot of parties myself, because I was chasing those feelings. Not just "parties" a.k.a. hangouts, but certifiable parties. That was one of my favorite things to do. I could sit here literally all day and write about some of the crazy parties we used to have, back when I would plan them regularly. So it's at least interesting that I now find myself in a position where I'm incredibly uncomfortable at those same kind of parties (and, it should go without saying, incredibly unmotivated to still plan them). And, in my darkest moments, I think: Was I really just planning all that shit so I had an excuse to drink heavily? I don't know. Probably.

But I guess that's why I like this song, "The Bird" by the Time. It purports that all you have to do to have a good time is lift your head and squawk like a bird. As Morris Day claims it, you don't need to be sexy, or have a personality, or, if the Last Call at the conclusion of the song is to be believed, you don't even need any more alcohol. You just gotta dance. I still cannot imagine soberly dancing, and I cannot imagine soberly having a good time at a big party with lots of strangers in attendance. But it's nice to listen to a fun song like this and think that one day I'll get there.

Thirsty Thursday: One Year

You are reading this almost exactly one year removed from the minute I finished what will hopefully go down as the final alcoholic drink of my life. I was feeling really good as I (true story alert) polished off that Twisted Tea that had been concealed in an inconspicuous paper grande coffee cup that I had brazenly arrived to my Practice with Children and Adolescents master's-level social work class with, already a bit tipsy. Feeling real good. But it doesn't last, of course, and by the time I lied in bed that night I felt the old cold familiar darkness creep over me. I once again voiced my opinion that I should probably stop drinking soon, and my wife correctly expressed disbelief, since I had made similar claims in the past and would no doubt make them in the future, especially since the claims that night came affixed to some bullshit about "well why don't if I just wait until the summer, I'll stop drinking then" and so on. And so I got pissed off and was like alright, fuck, I'll just quit tomorrow then, and Pam said "whatever" and rolled over and then I lied there in the dark and stared at the ceiling for another hour and made some decisions and then woke up the next morning sober and I've been sober ever since. Tomorrow, I'll be celebrating one year sober.

I would be lying if I said it was easy, but I'd also be lying if I said it didn't get significantly easier as time moved on. I didn't go back and read every previous Thirsty Thursday entry in preparation for writing this, but the snippets I breezed through felt like they contained a lot of confusion and pain and longing, which is to be expected. I can report from this juncture, one full year out, that I don't feel those emotions in any significant way any longer, most days. This isn't a surprise, and I don't consider it a "miracle" or anything hokey shit like that. I was told it would get better if I waited, and so I waited, and it got better. Simple as that.

The big turning point happened within the 24 hours after the most recent time I came to this blog and bitched and moaned about the s-word. That was a day removed from the start of 2024. A few hours and maybe even a few minutes removed from 2024, I found myself in the living room with Pam. Our New Year's Eves have been pretty subdued over the past few times around the sun due to the children, but this year especially so, since only one of us was drinking. And I finally got the courage to tell Pam the truth. The whole truth. She knew by that point that the sobriety was serious and permanent, but I needed to tell her the truth about why.

The truth was that I hid a lot from her. I hid a lot from everyone, but the most egregious lies are those you tell to those whom you're closest. Ain't no one closer in my life to me than Pam, and though I didn't articulate it this way to myself, I think the continued holding of past lies close to my chest was weighing on me. So I told her the extent of the damage done in the background. All the drinking that was done while I was out of the house and all the drinking that I did a slipshod job of trying to squeeze out of my system before I arrived back home. I didn't tell her every lurid detail on NYE, because maybe they weren't necessary (for example, if she still reads this blog and sees this blog post—I don't think she does too often, but maybe eventually—she'll be taken aback by the detail of the Twisted Tea consumed in class). But I told her the general idea, that I drank a lot more than I had ever let on.

Pam was extremely gracious about it, which I am thankful for. She would have had every right to be upset at me. No one likes being told that they were lied to, even if the lies were that of omission, and even if nine months of work had already been put in to make up for those hitherto unrevealed lies. Reframing a lot of your backstory is a painful process, no matter the circumstances. But she was gracious, and understanding, and I'm so goddamn relieved.

And I honestly attribute this newfound feeling of contentment to this act of confession and her forgiveness. It feels like just getting on the same page about everything really grounded me in a way that I couldn't find otherwise. It's not like everything is perfect forevermore. I still get sad when I think about what I lost, and I still get uncomfortable when I try to express that sadness in words. It's just that it's easier. Easier to go through each day without drinking. And every day since, it's taken up less and less space in my brain.

The temptation, at this point, is to write something like "and I still have a LONG way to go." Which is technically true—I still have a lot of life to live, and I plan on living it all in sobriety. But regarding the sobriety specifically, looking at it like that feels like the wrong way to go. I don't really have to do anything to remain sober. I just have to be. This isn't hard work. The day-by-day task of not drinking isn't hard in isolation. The "hard" part is doing it every single fucking day, but that only becomes hard when I stack 'em up. A year in, and I'm better at taking it day by day. I'm feeling fine. I'm feeling almost nothing, which is an improvement, honestly.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, really, except that tomorrow marks a one-year anniversary, and I needed to mark the occasion, before moving on to Year Two Day Two, and then Day Three, and so on and so on. It's been a year of change. Not for better or worse. Maybe better and worse. Maybe just different. We adjust to different, over time. A year in, and I'm adjusting, and adjusted. Thanks for being here.

Thirsty Thursday: Hitting the Road, Spinning the Wheels

Somebody asked me recently if I've never felt better in my life, currently, in sobriety, and the answer to that one is definitely no. It was always going to be one of those gets-worse-before-it-gets-better types of life decisions. Writing about it helps, but it's definitely been tough. Not physical, just emotionally. Maybe I've written too much about that already. But I think I'm ready to say that things are looking up in that regard. They aren't perfect, and I still get slapped every once in a while with a fresh sense of guilt or shame or jealousy or just this deep chasm of sadness or even just a general malaise of low-temp emptiness. But those moments are coming at me at a slower clip, and I have faith that they'll eventually be so infrequent that I'll be able to have confidence in my ability to handle them, when they do arise.

I spoke of sadness earlier in the week. I danced around the word "depression" because I knew that wasn't it, even though the description sure as heck sounded like it. I haven't felt that way since I wrote about it, so that's good. That speaks to the power of what I'm hoping to achieve in being open and honest on the blog about this shit. Not only did the writing help, but I addressed a possible source of the anhedonia shortly afterward. You see, one of the small pre-bedtime tasks is to fill up our water glasses. During the summer, when the tap water fails to get sufficiently cold, I usually use the filter system that's located inside the fridge. So I open up the door, and stand there for a total of like 45 seconds between the two waters. And I noticed the other day that while I'm doing that, my gaze usually falls upon the contents of the shelf at eye-level. Those contents, up until this past week, were about a half dozen beers (one Rolling Rock, one Sam Adams Winter Lager, a handful of Guinnesses).

It wasn't even something I would've noticed if I hadn't explored the sadness that I was feeling as I walked up the steps for bedtime. That act happened about 30 seconds after I had just stared absentmindedly at beer. I wasn't even conscious of it. But the hypothesis I came up with is that I have a weird sensation in my gut that almost feels like I'm gonna cry because I had unconsciously allowed the idea of drinking back into my head for that one minute. So I moved the beers to a lower shelf, out of my nocturnal sight line. The girls' sleep schedules have been fucked up enough that I can't say with complete certainty that that was the issue all along, but I can't argue with the results. I'm feeling better around the time of previous concern. Simple solutions. Baby steps for the sober baby.

A few days ago, my parents took Willow to some copaganda event at the local rec center, and she came home with a whole bunch of junk (some of it might actually prove useful—we have enough chip clips now!!!). One of the items in her bag was a coloring book. An anti-drinking coloring book from the PLCB. That made me feel a certain way, man, let me tell you. It felt like an easy target to lash out at, for one. Just, like, out of frustration. Because fuck the Liquor Control Board. Nothing about this coloring book or anything else those cretins get into does anything to prevent underage drinking or substance use or substance abuse.

But maybe I'm having such an adverse reaction to a dumb coloring book because it speaks to that general parenting fear that one might have for their children, in terms of "cycles of abuse" or whatever. Like, of course I don't want my daughters to find out the hard way that there is a way to seriously abuse this otherwise pretty fun intoxicant, but addressing that concern means providing a safety net for when they do want to explore a little bit (as teenagers are wont to do whether their parents try to stop them or not), and providing guidance that is borne of real-life experience. Just saying "well don't do it!" is fucking ignorant and in some ways actively harmful, even if its embedded in some asshole cop's coloring book. It's the McGruff thing again—preaching the morality of total abstinence implies that anyone not adhering to those arbitrary moral guidelines deserves to be punished. And fuck this color book and fuck the PLCB for attempting to draw those lines (literally, ha!) for my daughters at this age.

Yes, yes, it's a moot point, my oldest can't even read yet and so to her this is just another disposable coloring book that'll be filled out and thrown away by the end of the summer. But to me, it was a tiny and ultimately unimportant symbol of the stress I feel now, still, entrenched on the other side of things. Sometimes it feels like things should be more different than they actually feel right now. I was promised I'd feel better eventually. At this juncture, I mostly still feel either the same or worse.

Another friend asked me recently how my sobriety was going, and I told her I just felt sad a lot of the time, and we both recognized (from grad school) that this was a manifestation of ambiguous loss. That there are some things in life that still exist in the world but are no longer with you personally, and that causes these mixed feelings within you, like grief but not grief, both at the same time. That's an accurate description of how I feel at this point (142 days). I know that the loss was for the best, but I still feel the loss. Nothing about my life has gotten worse in the past 142 days. In fact, I count some tangible gains. But still, the feeling remains.

Like I said, though—it's getting better. In small increments, but still noticeable. We're traveling to North Wildwood in a couple days for the annual week-long family vacation. This will be the first time since I was sixteen that I will spend more than an hour in Wildwood without getting drunk at some point. Had you asked me at the beginning of 2023 what the possibility of a sober Wildwood experience might be like, I would've told you it would be totally and completely unbearable. Ask me now, and I might tell you that there are some moments when it doesn't even register. Sobriety is sinking in. I don't even think you can call Wildwood a "final boss" at this point. I'm not going to drink, I'm going to have a fine-to-good week, and that'll be that.

Do I wish I was drinking? Every fucking second of the day, to be completely honest with you. Still. But that's not going to change on family vacation, and so I fail to see how it matters anymore. It's not like it's going to be worse in Wildwood. The constant thrum of wanting to drink is so consistent that at this point it's almost boring. It makes me sad, but also I've been living with it for over 20 weeks now, and it's a bit passé.

So I don't think next week is going to require any sort of "update" here on Thirsty Thursday re: how things are going down the shore. There will be no update to write about in the first place. I already know the story. Nothing is going to change no matter where I am, geographically speaking. And honestly, at this point, I can imagine I've spun my wheels enough on this blog that you might be starting to get bored of it yourself. Totally makes sense. If I'm bored, then you're bored. That's how it goes. You could probably tell from the grab-bag framework of this blog post that I'm starting to hit my limit as far as writing about sobriety is concerned.

I'm not going to put Thirsty Thursday to bed completely, because this is a lifelong journey, and I don't doubt that there will be interesting thoughts to cross my mind in the future that feel worthy of being placed on the digital page. But I think I'm only going to return to this column when those thoughts arise, instead of trying to force it. The last couple of weeks have felt like me forcing it. Were I to continue, we might even get to the point where writing about it is actively harming me, like if it's just giving me space to wallow in the sadness and pity. That's not helpful.

Instead, I want to celebrate successes on my own time, in private spaces away from the internet. I want to travel to Wildwood and have the best week I possibly can. I want to say that I did something completely sober for the first time in almost two decades, and I want to feel good about that. I see that happiness off in the distant horizon, but I trust the process and know that I'll reach it eventually. And I think it would be better for the blog if we left it on that cliffhanger, if we temporarily abandoned this column right before the ending. You can extrapolate from here, if you want.

Thirsty Thursday: Branding Iron

I'd rather not wade too deeply into the waters of pseudo-political discourse, at least not today (sure, right, I can't help it sometimes, I get it). It already takes up way too much oxygen in the room, all this talk about cancel culture or whatever. Either the left does something normal and the right tries to cancel them, or the right does something obscene and then whines and complains about "cancel culture." It's all just a bunch of fucking finger-pointing that is ultimately designed to distract us from the fact that billionaires are hoarding wealth and the rest of us are left to starve.

So when I talk about Bud Light, please know that I'm not going to talk about it in that way. You know how I feel about it already anyway, assuming you read this blog even semi-regularly. You don't need the frothing at the mouth today. Not to mention that society is already moving along to the next great controversy (some fucking pop-country asshole sang a song about lynching liberals if they dare speak out against police corruption, and so on and so on into eternity).

If there is one overarching idea that I can admit (attached to a thousand stipulations, but still) that conservatives were correct about in the entire Bug Light fiasco, it's that beer brands can be part of one's identity, and that identity vis-à-vis those beer brands are chosen, a purposeful choice by the consumer of that product, knowing full well what the consumption of that product will say about you as the consumer. The evil part, of course, is that conservatives stopped drinking Bud Light en masse because they believe that Bud Light is pro-LGBTQ (despite the millions of dollars they spend on politicians who say the opposite), and, afraid that drinking Bud Light would cause others around them to believe that they too were pro-LGBTQ, they boycotted Bud Light, making sure that the world knew the truth, that conservatives want very badly for trans men and women to be dead.

But the correct part: what you drink says something about you. And I've spent a decent amount of time in the last week or so reflecting on some of the better examples from my life and my past that I could think of. (I was determined to take a more positive spin in this week's Thirsty Thursday column, since last week's kinda went off the deep end in terms of self-loathing, and no one wants to read that shit week after week. This is what I landed on. I don't know if I will be successful on the whole "positive" aspect to this blog post, based on the vitriol I've written so far. Hey, at least that vitriol is directed outward, toward parties that probably deserve it.)

I was thinking a lot about Lionshead, and how important that beer was to us, back in high school. True, most of the reason that we drank it had to do with price (if I recall correctly, you could buy a 24-pack for $9.99 back in 2006), but that in itself says a lot about who we were in high school, the radical self-acceptance that we were drinking and having fun under less than ideal circumstances (lack of money, for one). Plus, I think the puzzles held a certain appeal that I've grown to appreciate even more so as the idea of drinking Lionshead fades farther and farther away. It's, like, a metaphor. We were teenagers, and the world was mysterious, and we didn't really have a clue when it came to most things, and that time in our lives were all about exploring what was out there, making the unknowable more knowable, and solving those puzzles on the inside of the bottle cap was just one way of making that idea tangible, like we could know this thing, this one fucking thing, we could hang onto those caps and their solutions and pretend for just a moment that we understood the world and everything else in it.

I was thinking then about Natty Light, and how we transitioned to 30-birds of Natty at the start of college for logistical reasons. You could fit a case of 30 cans in a backpack comfortably. Even if 24 bottles could be removed from the cardboard Lionshead box and fit into that same backpack, they'd make one hell of a racket as you'd try to sneak 'em through security. Natty Light just made sense. Plus, more bang for your buck. The really interesting part here is that a lot of my older college friends, especially in the theater program, were big into Lionshead around the time (being 21 and not saddled with the duplicitous demands of underage drinking and sneaking around and all that), and I was not into it at all. Besides the fact that I had already drank too much of it and was literally ill at the sight of Lionshead by that point, I can also say that perhaps there was a conscious pushing away of something that represented high school so strongly. I was in college goddamn it. I was practically grown!! No time for that kiddie shit anymore!!

I was thinking about Hamm's too, which I didn't drink till a couple years after college graduation, and which I drank so frequently and with such efficacy that it kind of became a "thing" with me. I'm talking Hamm's T-shirts as gifts, that type of thing. I don't know what Hamm's said originally about me as a person at the beginning, besides my desire to be frugal, but by the end of my time with that beer, I had shaped it in my own image. It was my brand, and I consciously turned it into a beer that meant "good times." Not sure if anyone else necessarily thought that (though I was told in the mid-2010s that Hamm's was the "official beer of the La Salle Jazz Band" after we got loaded on it during a band trip to the NCAA tournament, so take that as you will). I'm just saying that this is what I wanted Hamm's to mean. Hamm's was mine, and Hamm's was me, and I was Hamm's. I wanted to be a certain kind of person, and I used Hamm's as the means to represent that ideal version of myself.

And there are plenty of other little anecdotes scattered around our years of drinking that are connected to this phenomenon. Rolling Rock has always, to me, felt like a fancy beer punching above its actual weight, just based on the tiny memory I have of drinking warm Rolling Rocks out of my garage when my parents were out. Hurricane forties... I mean, I could talk all day about what they meant to the people who deigned to drink them in college, and how fucking cool it was to carry around that forty bottle, not to mention some of the insane adventures we went on to acquire them. Milwaukee's Best seems "Northeast Philly" to me, like a townie beer, and whenever I wanted to feel like that sort of townie and get in touch with my roots, I'd reach for that beer.

I can't be the only one who had these thoughts, consciously or subconsciously. I recall plenty of friends with a myriad of strange, cheap beers that they were attempting to make into a thing. Like when Dave would bring a case of Keystone Light to every party for a while there, and insist on calling it "Key" (what's up, Dave). Or the cases of Boxer... wait, who was it that insisted on getting Boxer beer, with its patented 36 beers in every case? Some things are lost in the sands of time. Not to mention brand choices I never knew to begin with, like how a few of my pals from New England were nicknamed "the Gennys" in high school due to their penchant for drinking Genesee Cream Ale (I assume).

There are a million choices out there. Many of our country's dumbest individuals are making that choice right now, and purposefully eschewing Bud Light, officially dropping it down from its previous perch as America's Most Popular Beer (now its Modelo, which is under the same evil corporate umbrella). It's stupid, but the point here is that the choice means something. You choose a beer brand to say something about you as a person, good or bad. The ultimate goal while drinking is to get drunk, yes, but along the way, we make choices, and those choices give the drinking meaning.

I guess I get a little sad when I think about this idea of choice when it comes to beer brands, because there's no longer a choice for me. I'm not whining or complaining, I promise. The choice I had was to drink or not drink, and by choosing the latter, a lot of those other choices ceased to exist for me, and I have to live with that. But without being able to choose what I drink and who made the beer that I'm drinking and adorning myself with the logo of that beer of choice either explicitly or implicitly, I am in a sense losing a part of myself. If my beer brand became shorthand for who I was and who I wanted to be, then what does not choosing look like?

The answer becomes vastly more complicated, and on my worst days, I yearn for the ability to just answer with: "I'm a guy who loves Hamm's Special Light."

Thirsty Thursday: Bad Dog

Pam and the girls were dogsitting this week at our house. I purposefully didn't use the first-person plural pronoun "we" because I didn't really want much to do with that whole thing. This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who reads this blog: I don't like dogs. More importantly than that, I believe that my reasons for disliking dogs are legitimate, and it offends me when I'm told otherwise. Dogs threaten my safety, my comfort, and my way of life. But I've already written about this. I've probably told you about it in person. I don't need to rehash it here.

Maybe I did need to rehash it a few more times at home, I guess. I do this thing where I feel really strongly about a particular thing (both positively and negatively, depending on the subject), and I project that opinion onto other people. Rarely am I correct in my assumptions, and occasionally it causes whiplash. For instance, when I walk into my household, and this fucking dog starts barking at me, and I'm told that it's my fault that the dog is barking. He "knows I don't like him." I preach against the victim-blaming that for some reason is inherent in dog owners (e.g. "if you didn't want to get bit you shouldn't have gotten so close!"), and yet all of a sudden, I'm being threatened, in my own goddamn home, and it's the dog who is the victim.

That hurt a lot. I felt more lonely then I had in a while. I assumed—because of the projection—that I had at least one teammate regarding this particular subject, and all of a sudden, that wasn't true. I was an unwanted creature on my home turf. I'm not going to lie, I reacted poorly and petulantly to this turn of events. I spent the rest of the day acting like a infant, pouting and frowning and sullen. I have emotional needs, and I felt like those needs weren't being addressed.

Once I cooled down enough to be able to name these emotions (which took a full 24 hours, since I'm not nearly as in touch with my emotions as I like to think I am, and plus it's really difficult to think clearly when some disgusting creature is sharing your bed now and he's shaking the bed frame because he's furiously licking his own balls), it was first time for some big apologies, and some big promises about how I'm going to do my best to go against my better judgment for the sake of the family. It was also time to examine why I wanted to drink so badly the night before.

I've sometimes prided myself on not automatically reaching for the bottle during the low moments of my life. Occasionally it feels even easier to stay sober when I'm sad. Alcohol was more of a supplement to the good times in life. Drinking was celebratory, not grievous. So it was interesting that when I felt so upset at the presence of a fifteen-pound hypoallergenic beast, I was gut-punched by the existence of the top shelf of the refrigerator and the Rolling Rocks resting on it. That's a new feeling.

Here's what I came up with. I have emotional needs, like any normal human. The abnormal part, however, is that a function of my emotional needs—or at least how I trained myself to need, emotionally—was drinking. I felt a certain way while drunk that had tangible benefits for me. I felt better about the world when I was drinking. I felt more attuned to my fellow man, and that felt great. The fact that I needed alcohol to feel that way is a huge part of the problem, of course, and so conversely a huge task in sobriety is learning how to feel that contentment without artificial assistance. It's a work in progress.

But I think that's probably why I was figuratively reaching for the bottle that first night with the dog. I felt betrayed and empty due to that day's events, and so subconsciously I was wishing I could fill that emptiness in a way that I knew would work. Feeling disconnected, I yearned for a way to connect. I often found that while drinking. This wasn't me trying to heal a wound, because alcohol never healed. It was just that those very negative feelings I felt in that particular canine context scarily resembled the negative feelings I felt and feel in the absence of substances. And so I was subconsciously attempting to course-correct, or at the very least wishing I could in a tried and true and proven way.

When I talk about alcohol consumption filling some emotional need, I'm not bullshitting. However, I think if you consider the negatives that came with that (of which there are many already documented examples on this blog), then I need to start considering the hard truth that sometimes filling my emotional needs is a bad thing to do. Yes, I needed emotional fulfillment during a strenuous and disappointing day in my life, but fulfilling that need would've looked selfish at best, and criminal at worst. The aforementioned pouting and spreading my misery to others in my household at one end of that spectrum, and, I dunno, tying the dog in a sack and dropping him in Pennypack Creek at the other end. I would've felt better, but that would have been to the detriment of both me and those around me.

Maybe part of sobriety is denying yourself immediate emotional fulfillment every second of the goddamn day, and attempting instead to zoom out and see the bigger picture. It was the need to feel placated that got me in this predicament in the first place, so maybe I should explore some other options at this current juncture.

I think I also need to acknowledge a separate but tangential idea to this, and that's the inherent self-hatred that comes along with sobriety, and other emotions like regret and the need for punishment. That's a thing with sobriety, right? I can't remember if I was told this while reading Infinite Jest or during a text conversation with Walter or by an anonymous individual at one of the sparse few AA meetings I've attended, but I recall the idea that some alcoholics in sobriety feel this inherent need to be flagellated for their crimes committed while previously intoxicated. It's another emotional need, to feel like you can't achieve or earn forgiveness until you are punished in some way. In a fucked up way, the pain of punishment could feel redemptive. Like a baptism by fire. (Is that what that phrase means? No? Okay, moving on...)

That's not healthy either, of course, but that's definitely where I'm at right now in the journey. I think about this a lot when I get uncomfortable around my friends. I've already talked about this a little bit, but when it comes to the important people in my life, I feel like there are very few people who, one, understand why I'm doing what I'm doing, and two, know how to respond to what I'm doing. I am totally empathetic to the plight of the good friend who wants to respect their friend's life choices and thus walks on eggshells in an attempt to not offend or harm. That's way better than actively harming or dismissing, of course.

But recently, I've grown a little uncomfortable myself with that reaction. I'm starting to feel like I would be more comfortable if some of my friends just called me a piece of shit. That would make more sense to me, emotionally. It's like, I feel like I was a shitty person when I was drinking, and that I don't deserve respect or congratulations at this point. I know that's some toxic, self-hating behavior, but I can't help it. I don't know how to respond to well wishes and votes of confidence. It's way easier for me to be able to say sorry. (This is probably why I find myself shying away from my already sober friends regarding this particular subject, because on some level I'm not ready for real and true empathy, and would rather just have someone call me a fucking asshole.)

Of course, there's also the possibility that all of this amounts to being self-centered. The need for punishment, the blogging about it... I mean, it could just be that no one actually gives a shit whether I'm drinking or sober, and the bafflement on how to respond to my sobriety more stems from a confusion as to why I'm making such a big deal about it. Okay, fine, I admit that this is a possibility. I am not the main character, and so on and so on.

Just in case anyone does think about their friend's sobriety for more than a nanosecond, I propose a challenge: let's get messy with it. I'm not doing anything that deserves congratulations, so I'm relieving you of the obligation to congratulate me. Give me your skepticism, give me your confusion, give me your reluctance, give me your regret, give me your disappointment. Now is the time. I am open to it. In fact, on some fucked up level, I need it.

In some ways, the presence of a mongrel dog in my home is a physical manifestation of this self-hatred and this need for punishment. I've spoken about my emotional needs at this time, and Pam rightly pointed out that there have been plenty of times in my life when I have neglected or even rejected the emotional needs of others. See, that's what I'm talking about. I'm asking for my emotional needs to be met, but I don't even fucking know what that means. My fucked up brain thinks that it means drinking ten beers. And I don't deserve to feel that good drunk or sober, because I've done such a terrible job addressing those needs in others.

I deserve the barking. Yes, even in my own home. Especially in my own home, maybe. I am a piece of shit and how dare I consider myself the victim here. I am not a victim, and never have been. Always the perpetrator. Maybe it's time that I learn to take the punishment instead of bitching and moaning about my emotional needs. It's time to put those on a shelf, at least temporarily, while I get my shit together, and learn how to fulfill them in healthy and responsible ways.

I'm not being barked at by a dog. I am the dog.

Thirsty Thursday: Black Me Out

I am steadfastly committed to the idea that nothing helpful can be achieved in relitigating any of the mistakes I made while I was intoxicated. I have regrets, but those regrets are borne out of the fear that my mistakes will have lasting consequences. I'm trying to find my zen in the idea that I should be thankful for how lucky I was overall, and then just try to move forward, improving and evolving.

One idea that I'm struggling with in this regard is the concept of "blacking out," and how comfortably I've lived with the concept since college. I've used the term liberally over the years, but in this case I'm defining "blackout" as any night in which a large block of time (let's say an hour or more) is completely erased from your mind by the time morning rolls around. It's a complete sacrifice of one's faculties.

You can argue whether you are a "different person" or not, when blacked out. I tend to believe that you are the same person, just with ego and superego gagged and bound and locked in a closet. You're all id, which is you, but only a part of you under normal circumstances. It's id unleashed. It's a scary idea, when you think about it that way, because the id is pretty often kept in check for a reason. One's id can be an ugly thing if that's all there is.

It can also be innocuous, if nothing notable happens. Maybe you black out when you're sitting around the dinner table, late at night with some friends, and your blacking out just means you're a little more silent than you'd normally be, or maybe you are repeating yourself to an annoying degree. I don't know. Not every blackout is a train crash, even though every blackout has the potential to be.

I guess that's what scares me. I was never a perfect angel under those circumstances, but I also by and large escaped long-term consequences, due to a fortunate combination of tolerant and forgiving friends, a humility and willingness to apologize immediately after the fact, and just pure fucking dumb luck. Even the worst of the worst—alluded to a couple weeks ago—was smoothed out with some hard work and with a lot of time passed.

My rough-draft thoughts for this blog post were to do something along the lines of listing my Top Ten Worst Blackouts or something to that effect. I could name a few big ones. But I also don't know how helpful that would be to anyone, including myself. Partially because I don't want to scratch old wounds, sure. But part of it is that to make a Top Ten list, you need to know your subject very well, and a "blackout" by its very definition is not knowing. How can I say that one blackout is worse than another if I wasn't mindfully present for either? Doesn't make sense, and at that point a guess would be a piss in the wind.

There's a delicate balance, too, in trying to take the mistakes seriously but not harp on them. There are some funny ass stories involving me blacking out, and in telling them, I often make light of the details and my own behavior. Because it's funny! But that's also papering over some of the more gruesome hypotheticals attached to that behavior. I don't want to live in that space, but I don't want to ignore that space either. The two sides of the coin are, in fact, part of the exact same coin.

Maybe an example is needed. Here's a story that's been alluded to in a few different forms on the blog over the years, but give me like three paragraphs now to flesh out some of the details and tell the full tale, as it relates to the idea of blackouts that we're focusing on today.

Toward the end of my junior year—a week or so before I met Pam—I was invited to a dinner outing with some of the Jazz Band "officers" (I was the secretary or something, and also the incoming president) to an Italian restaurant on Girard. It was BYOB. For reasons that I'd probably do just as well not dwelling on at this current juncture, I decided to buy a few Four Loko, which were brand new on the market, and were still in their most lethal form (laced with caffeine). I drank copious amounts of the house red wine, but then decided to crack open a Loko. My last memory prior to blackout was the Four Loko being passed around the table, with even our conductor and his wife (who was my high school health teacher, the irony occurs to me just now) and also the late great Brother Tom taking a taste.

Then, boom—all of a sudden I'm running down Olney Ave. barefoot. Quite the smash cut, and it's still pretty funny, I suppose, when I put it that way. Here's what I missed in the meantime: drooling and talking gibberish at the table; needing a ride back to La Salle by Brother Tom; mumbling "fuck" while riding shotgun in Brother's car; thinking that we were at La Salle whenever we stopped at a red light, and attempting to get out of the car; getting dropped off at La Salle Apartments, laying down on C2's couch; throwing up, mostly into my own shoes, but let's be real probably all over the fucking place; the contents of the vomit (whether dark red because of the Italians meats and sauces of the just-consumed dinner or actual pieces of my internal organs is still a matter of urban myth all these years later) causing great concern for my friends who were present, and the idea of a trip to the hospital being brought to the forefront; an alarm in the deep recesses of my brain thinking that a hospital trip was not needed, and thus, the running away.

I remember bits and pieces of the rest of the night—hiding from my friends in the Collegian office, everyone wondering where my shoes were, attending the Improv 101 show and making a complete ass of myself, existing off that BAC for the entirety of the after party (where I more than likely just sat mostly silent in a reclining chair), making my way back to the apartment I had made a mess in and being kicked out (understandably so, both then and now) and driving home at 1 in the morning (I was living in Rockledge at the time).

Whenever this story is brought up these days, I'm sheepish in all regards except the argument about the throw up, and whether it should have cause the alarm that it did at the time. I would maintain now that my argument about the puke being "more of gravy than of grave" is only funny because it's besides the point. I acknowledge that the point was that my friends were worried about me. It doesn't feel good to say that I spit in their faces and literally ran away. I knew this, mostly, by the early morning hours of hangover/sobriety, when I was calling Brother Tom and Mr. C. to say sorry, and I was stopping at the grocery store on the way back to my apartment-away-from-home to buy cleaning supplies as a flimsy way of apologizing to my pals for my actions.

I guess what I'm saying right this second is that the evolution here and now is when I finally understand the concern and the worry. There's a difference between apologizing and understanding. I gave out the former like fucking candy throughout the past twenty years, but the latter is only recently landing for me. I'm starting to understand exactly what those blackouts must have looked like on the other side, how fucking ugly it must have appeared, and how much concern it must have—and should have—caused.

Understanding the fear is probably what put me in this position in the first place. I was only able to blackout—or work toward it consciously or unconsciously—because I didn't fear it. I had no fear about what could happen when I completely let go and turned off my brain completely. The luck and the familial support and the superhuman ability to express humility with hat firmly in hand all combined into a double-edged sword, all of it protecting me from any real consequence, the shit that might've awoken me to the risk that I was taking.

At the very end of drinking and at the very beginning of sobriety, I was talking about this dark figure creeping into the very back of my mind, a black pall that was starting to envelop me as I continued to drink, some unexplainable force that was prodding me in the direction of sobriety whether I wanted it or not. I think now we can tighten the focus and call it what it actually was: fear. Due to age or life's circumstances or supernatural forces, I was finally starting to be afraid of alcohol. That fear forced the decision: stop drinking, or die at an gradually accelerating speed.

To go a step further, though, I think my feelings about blackouts specifically speak to the next step: recognizing that that fear was there all along, except that it existed in others. Throwing up in a way that it could reasonably be described as a medical emergency, along with a lifetime of other situations that I imposed upon others in a blackout state, must have been pretty scary.

That's not a feeling I've ever seriously considered. Seriously! Of course I've had friends who, on any given night, were drunker than I was. But I've never been scared for them, and I think that was a defense mechanism. I was attempting to normalize the behavior in others so that I too would not face any consequences when it was my turn to black out. So take anything I've ever said on the subject with a grain of salt on the rim of a glass of skepticism.

What I'm saying now is that I fucking get it. It's not me finding something new within myself. This is me recognizing something that was in other people this entire time, and how unfair it was for me to ignore it or not acknowledge its presence. To all those who rightfully wasted even one minute of your time worrying about my safety and welfare, I say to you now: thank you. You're a great friend. I want you to know that I feel that same fear too now, and that I'm working my ass off so that neither of us ever have to feel that way again.

Like I said last time, I do truly believe that one of the main purposes and goals of this whole s-word thing is to collapse all known Joe variations into a single human being, and we can include blackouts into that. Yes, Blackout Joe was the same person as Sober Joe, just a different version (and purposefully so, I should add). That makes me extremely uncomfortable. I don't want different versions to exist. I want consistency in my life. I want one me.

Thirsty Thursday: Sneaky Sneaky

Walking around my neighborhood, I often see certain hidden locales, discreet crevices, or shady corners, and I think to myself, "Damn, that would've been a good place to drink when I was a teenager." I don't have a firm understand yet why my brain leads me to those thoughts when confronted with an otherwise normal and nondescript geographical location in my hometown. It's most likely just a way to idly pass the time. But it occurred to me the other day that those thoughts might speak to the current predicament I find myself in, i.e. sobriety.

Underage drinking goes hand-in-hand with secrecy. That's out of necessity, since the act of consuming alcohol while under the age of 21 is against the law (whether it should be against the law is a different story that was already covered on this blog approximately one thousand years ago). If "caught" with alcohol anywhere from the age of 0 to 20, you "get in trouble" by whatever authority figure "caught" you. I place those words in quotes, because the severity varies greatly depending on who is doing the rule-breaking and who is doing the rule-enforcing. But you get my point. Because of the law (in America—also a different story for a different time), it is impossible to drink while underage with complete impunity.

But I think now that the secrecy and the subterfuge was also a function of drinking back then. Underage drinking wasn't about the drinking itself, it was about the act of getting away with doing something illegal and/or against household rules. That was the whole fucking point. When I ask myself at the age of 34 something like "Why didn't three or four of us sixteen-year-olds just sit on the train platform behind the McDonald's and discreetly drink vodka out of supersized soda cups and hangout and converse at a considerate volume?", then that's really missing the point of what we were trying to achieve at that age.

Rolling a heavy keg into the woods directly across the street from residential twin homes and packing 40 friends into those woods to drink copious amounts of beer and scream and shriek and make all kinds of racket and piss off the neighbors and get the cops called and escape by the skin of our teeth, man, that's what it was all about. Hiding, yes, but also making that "hiding" noticeable and visible. Like we were getting one over on everyone who told us what we couldn't do. It wasn't about the drinking! During any "drinking night" from ages sixteen to like 18.5, there was a good chance I wasn't even getting drunk. It was more about the game of cat-and-mouse. It was more about the thrill of the act of drinking then actually drinking.

And now I'm trying to think about how this applies to present day. I'm not just sitting here typing about the old days for no reason. There has to be a purpose here. So let's move forward—obviously, that act of "hiding" or "getting away with it" faded over time. College involved a lot of similar stratagems for drinking, a lot of deception, plenty of which went awry and resulted in disciplinary torture, but at the same time, college acted as a sort of barrier between me (the drinker) and most of the authority figures that prevented me from openly drinking in the past (mainly, parents and police). Community Development and their minions huffed and puffed, but at the end of the day, I pretty much drank when I wanted to drink. So the alcohol intake increased.

And by the time I graduated, I was of legal age, and an adult by most definitions, and able to make my own decisions when it came to what I did and did not ingest. Without the tension of drinking-even-though-I'm-not-supposed-to-be-drinking, the focus of the act became the drinking itself. We were able to sit at a bar and order shots and no one could stop us. I might even argue that such an act is by and large encouraged in the society we live in, were I able to make such an argument without tacitly admitting that I was doing much of the encouraging for myself and my peers. But the overall point here is that drinking was missing the danger and the chicanery. It became normal.

Maybe because it was normal did I drink a whole fuck of a lot of alcohol, like as a subconscious way to make it not normal. Maybe I didn't like drinking safely, and without anyone telling me I shouldn't be drinking, I pushed the limits, and drank to blackout, to keep it dangerous, and thus exciting, and thus in some fucked up way continuing a trend that I started when I was sixteen. Maybe some deep rooted desire of mine is to drink under duress. That's fucked up and stupid and but also true. I see it now, as I'm typing this out.

Now let's connect it to present day. There were a few years—let's say about seven—in which that's how I functioned, vis-à-vis drinking alcohol. Drinking whatever I wanted, and going hard while drinking because that the risk was appealing. But at a certain point, that either stopped or slowed down significantly. I'll speak plainly here—I'm talking about having children. I'm not saying that being a parent is "the ultimate responsibility" or any of that highfalutin bullshit. It's not that parenting is necessarily even all the difficult, especially if your baseline is "keep 'em alive and don't fuck 'em up too badly." I'm more talking about how the societal expectation is that parenting is a responsibility that crowds the room enough that you really just can't drink like you used to, whether you want to or not. And, like, I wanted to. If I could've had it both ways, I would have. That's fucked up too, but I'm more just stating facts here, and the facts are that, because of the sleep that you lose and the time devoted to childcare and then also keeping everybody afloat financially on top of that, there's way less time to devote to going out and getting fucked up like you used to.

This is a good thing for most people. It's called "growing up," and it has a way of flattening out the problems with alcohol that a lot of people had in young adulthood. Research shows that most people cut back on their drinking as they reach their 30s. I personally interpret that data as a matter of logistics than personal choice. It's not like people are waking up on their 30th birthday and saying "whelp, I've had enough" (though not everyone does a power hour on their 30th birthday either). It's more like life's natural progression leads most people to a point in their lives when drinking like you used to becomes untenable.

I keep saying "most people," and so here's the dropping of this particular hammer: I am not most people. Yes, clearly I was not still going out every weekend, since I had kids at home. I've done enough eulogizing of that lifestyle on this blog over the years, and the realization over the past few years that I am okay with not going out like that anymore, and the realization that there's much fulfillment to be found in the home, with family, all of that is completely true and honest and not just some weak ass papering over of some deeper darker thoughts.

At the same time, though, there still remained the desire to drink. Perhaps more importantly, I'm seeing now, there remained a desire to drink dangerously. And if you twist the word "dangerously" enough, you can see that my current life situation allowed for a lot of it, still. It might have even opened up new opportunities for risky drinking, or covert drinking, or antiauthoritarian drinking, or however you want to describe it. In the past few years—let's say about four—this conscious or unconscious desire to drink in this way manifested in two different ways.

The first... I'm hesitant to type here in public. There's a line between radical honesty and suicidal honesty. I deserve any punishment that the world deems fit to deal me, but I don't want to create unnecessary punishment if I don't have to, especially if that punishment is going to affect my ability to provide for my family. But you can fill in the blanks here. It's easy. Think about the cliché of "drunk suburban breadwinner dad," and assume that the tenets of that cliché are cliché for a reason. Maybe picture a dad hiding in his garage, surreptitiously sipping from a bottle of bourbon, and now apply that to a man who doesn't have a garage and who hates bourbon. Let's just say that I found every inappropriate context in which to imbibe and I indulged whenever I could in those inappropriate contexts, both alone and with others.

The second also makes me briefly hesitant, because I'm going to talk openly and honestly about my relationship with someone who is currently reading this blog post right now—Pam, my life partner for over thirteen years now. And because I love her so much and I highly respect her and I care deeply about our relationship, I feel the pressure to write clearly and precisely when talking about her and about us, and writing that way is something that I am absolutely terrible at on this blog. So I'm just gonna talk from the gut here and do what we always do—speak one-on-one later on, after she reads this, and clear up any misconceptions my dogshit writing may have induced.

Here is a fact I present without judgment: Pam made drinking not fun for me in the past five years. Actually, no, here's a judgment: the fact that Pam made drinking not fun for me during that time was a good thing for our relationship, and I think was (whether she intended her actions to achieve this purpose or not) ultimately out of concern for me and my issues. I received constant shit for every single serving of alcohol I drank around her (or so I would think, in the moment). Every fight we've had in the past five years has been about my drinking. I get it now, regarding the why. She was upset because she knew that I couldn't stop drinking. Who wouldn't be upset about their partner in that type of situation? This isn't me blaming her for not letting me drink what and when I wanted to drink without any pushback. It's the opposite. In retrospect, I'm thankful for it.

But it's tough to see the forest when you're right up there next to a tree. And maybe in the moment I harbored some resentment, that I could no longer just get drunk and have fun with my wife. Now take it back to the beginning, and to today's revelation. I trained myself from the very beginning to only ever truly appreciate drinking when I was pulling the wool over someone's eyes. And you can connect the dots from there.

So it ended up kind of turning into this low-burn secrecy thing, with the person I'm hiding it from being the person in my life whom I love the most. I was really only enjoying the drinking when I was either by myself or with non-family members, and so, after enough time, the kneejerk reaction became "Okay, Pam's gone, time to drink." That quote seems really harsh, but I don't know if there's any other way to put it.

I didn't even realize it or think about the truth of the matter until two weeks ago, on Day 100, when this realization hit me pretty hard. It was my mother-in-law's birthday, and so Pammy and her sister brought their parents to a winery near the house we were staying in. Me and my brother-in-law stayed back with the kids. I didn't skip the winery for sobriety-related reasons, e.g. that I "wouldn't be able to handle" being around alcohol or whatever. Let's call it sobriety-tangential reasons—I wasn't going to be drinking, and the kids obviously weren't going to be drinking, so in my mind it was just easier to hang at the house with the kids than have to hang at a winery with the kids.

But so there we are, me and brother-in-law and the five kids, and we're just chilling around the table playing a memory card game with the kids, and out of nowhere I get fucking blasted with the intense thought of: "This would be a great time for a drink." Once again, and at the risk of appearing to protest too much: my sobriety stint is structured so that the actual possibility of drinking in that situation is close to, if not actually, zero. The fallout—physically, emotionally, familially, psychically—is just too fucking large and imposing for me to have a beer in that moment.

The thought was strong and daunting enough, though, that it was worth kind turning over and examining. Why that thought at that particular moment? I'm forced to consider the probability that the thought occurred to me in that moment because Pam wasn't there, and I've inadvertently conditioned myself to "take advantage" of those moments by drinking.

That revelation has a way of reframing certain actions and reactions in my recent past. I'm thinking now (once again) about Dwyer's bachelor party, and how fun it was (the fun will not be reframed). But let's consider the fact that I spent a lot of time during that weekend trip drinking. Not quantity of alcohol consumed (which, sure, added up certainly amounted to a whole lot of alcohol), but length of time drinking. I was the first one awake every day, and in the darkness of the curtained hotel room and in the soft glow of my laptop, I would begin drinking. And then, like any top-tier functioning alcoholic, I cautiously would measure out the rest of the day's consumption in increments, making sure to drink plenty of water and eat plenty of food. I thought I did a really good job, and, due to the combination of being pleasantly intoxicated for 72 hours straight and doing so with some of my very best friends and very favorite acquaintances, I had so much fun.

Then cut to the wedding itself, and me and Pam are sitting at a table with some of the groomsmen and groom's friends whom I hadn't seen since that bachelor party, and there's some light discussion about how "crazy" I was at the bachelor party, based on the fact that I was waking up and drinking chardonnay and grapefruit seltzer spritzers at like 6 AM every morning. Pam is rightly taken aback: "You did what?!" So I spent a lot of time during that wedding (a wedding during which, crucially, I was pulling similar tricks and drinking the entire length of the day) attempting to explain it to Pam that, like, so fucking what, I was drinking in the morning, because I was also pretty responsible, that I was making sure to stay hydrated and well-fed as I tipsily scootered hither and tither around Austin, TX, and there was nothing but good times and good vibes to be had, with zero consequences (minus the COVID thing, which would've happened with or without the breakfast boozing), and so like who gives a shit what other people are saying about what they perceived my actions re: drinking to be, you know me better than that, etc. etc.

Not for one second touching on the actual issue here. It wasn't that I was drinking or when, it was that I was hiding something from my wife. On some level, I knew that she would have a negative reaction to the amount that and the manner in which I drank at the bachelor party, and so I made either a conscious or unconscious decision to just lie by omission. Hence, the sense of betrayal when the truth was exposed, even though I was too dense (or drunk) at the time to understand that.

But the larger point I'm trying to make here isn't to rehash every misstep I've ever made. My point is to connect this specific event, and others, to what I now perceive as a pattern in my life when it comes to drinking. Every step of the way, I've been dissatisfied with the simple act of drinking. It always had to be more. It always had to be a way to punch back at the universe and the shit that it hands out. I was learned in this particular way of existence at the beginning of my alcohol journey, when I was told by authority figures that I couldn't drink, and so I did anyway. That mindset carried over to when those authority figures went silent, and so I lashed out instead by drinking too much. Then, finally, when the act of "drinking too much" became impossible, I transferred the implicit resentment to the home, toward the person I care about most in this world. In my endless search for an authority figure to rail against, I unwittingly applied that to my wife, and "fought back" by drinking whenever I could in her absence, all over the fucking place, geographically and emotionally.

I still think about those days at the beginning, those halcyon years of childhood, when we hid in the woods and we drank beer. I doubt I'll ever stop thinking about them. I see now, though, that the act of drinking back then was a purposeful act of splitting myself into different people. I had multiple personalities that I could apply to any given situation like a Swiss army knife. This was to my benefit, as I saw it then, and now. I could step into Burholme Park and be a wild and crazy dude, and then I could step into the classroom and be a mild-mannered A-/B+ student student, and then I could step into my home and be the kind of son my parents could be proud of, unless I was caught drinking, in which case my parents freaked out because they saw a different personality then the one I was obligated to keep up front at home, and so on. It makes sense when you're young, to have these siloed personalities, and drinking facilitated it. I could be a different person sometimes, and I could feel free.

But that need follows you, and then one day you wake up in your mid-30s and you realize that you are still a completely different person in different situations and around different people. And you find that you're hiding certain aspects of yourself from certain people because of that. So the act of sobriety, depending on how you look at it, could be akin to the act of collapsing all of one's personalities into a single True You. I've spent my entire life hiding in one way or another. I don't want to hide anymore.