How Dry I Am

I'm writing this on Sunday, May 9th - that being the case, I'm proud to announce that I have gone one entire week without even looking sideways at a drink. This break was completely by choice, and not the result of A) an upcoming physical that required I not drink or B) abject poverty keeping me from buying a pint of Night Train.

See, once in a while I have to do these little trials of abstinence just to square things up.  See, booze occasionally thinks it's the boss of me, and every so often, when it gets a little too big for its bottle, I just have to remind it that is in fact not the boss of me - verily, that I am the boss of IT. 

Papa taking his medicine

It's a damn near thing sometimes, though, and that's what prompted this last little break. When I wrapped up Penguicon on Sunday, I realized that despite the tremendous volume of alcohol consumed, I still felt basically okay on Sunday (not great, but okay) - we'd been doing a lot of walking and swimming, and I reasoned that all this activity had somehow helped me to pace myself.

Nevertheless, it was the first Sunday in a long time where I felt "basically okay" at all.  My default Sunday feeling for about the last year or so has been groggy, nauseous, disconnected, sore, and craving a big greasy omelet.  As much as I love to drink, it had become very clear that I'd been doing excess to excess. 

I'll help give you some context here:  Ever go to, say, the alcoholics anonymous website or something, and they give you a checklist of questions like "do you have more than X drinks per night" or "do you frequently not remember events that occurred while drinking," and it says that if you check 3 or more of those things then you could be an alcoholic?  Of course you have, and you've probably checked off 3 because some of them are completely asinine, like "do you drink to make parties more fun," and it's like, durrr, that's kind of the point.

Self-righteous smiley-faced asshole

When I take the questionnaires, I approach 90th percentile, because to keep myself honest I have to answer yes to some of the creepy ones, like, "Have your family or friends ever told you that you might have a problem," or "have you lost friends because of drinking," or even "have you ever woken up in a pool of your own vomit, consumed by the dread feeling that you've done something terrible, something too horrible to mention, but you couldn't remember what, and the vague memory of it haunts you to this day years later, and you don't know which you fear worse: the consequences of your contemptible action or the thought of never knowing just what reprehensible and shameful things you've done?"

Well, sufficed to say I like booze more than most people, and (to paraphrase Strong Sad of Homestarrrunner), that means not just that I like booze more than most people like booze, but also that I like booze more than I like most people.The reasons are as follows:

Booze certainly helps get a party going.  If people are all together and stressed out about their jobs, a pot of coffee and a plate of lady fingers isn't going to help shake that up: a half-gallon of vodka and the pop hits of Ke$sha will.  No, you probably can't solve a problem that way, but you can put that problem in perspective by taking the fast train to funsville and getting a little reckless.  In that way, my drinking is no different than that of anyone else.

The ability to drink me under the table is so hot

In addition to all that, I also drink to quiet the shrieking voices in my head.  Writing is a taxing thing, emotionally, intellectually, and even physically.  Something I came to realize this last week was that a part of my drinking comes from a desire to get away from the burden of writing.  These blog posts?  I can do those drunk - I'm just espousing thoughts and recalling anecdotes.  Good fiction, on the other hand, requires more. 

Good fiction, if it is to be honest, requires that I go back in my memory and dredge up painful, shocking, embarrassing stuff from the past and then tell everyone about it.  It requires a degree of honesty that would be horribly inappropriate if you just told these facts or stories to a group of strangers, but yet it is a degree of honesty that is necessary in fiction. 

That also means that, when writing in a mode of jubilation, I don't get to keep good things for myself either.  The page, and this is just my own particular neurosis / psychosis / etc, gets everything, and drinking is a way to quiet that down and feel like maybe, just for a while, it's okay to live my own life and to not listen to "the muse" (if I may indulge an old trope).

I'm holding a beverage here

So what's a writer to do?  Obviously, not drink so much.  There seem to be enough test cases around - Hemingway, Bukowski, Faulkner - that I shouldn't have to qualify that.  A writer who drinks runs a very apparent risk of drinking himself to ruination, drinking himself to death, or drinking himself to irrelevance, producing page after page of incoherent babble as he further and further disassociates from the world around him.

Drinking quiets that murky black fear, that white-hot rage and the bloody red laughter that makes writing possible, and when those deep wells are covered, writing becomes harder.  We writers often trick ourselves into thinking that a couple drinks will loosen us up and get the creative juices flowing, but we know better.  We know that a half drink, a splash of whiskey in water, might relax the muscles and help the brain to explore its dark corners, but that's how the habit starts.  That splash of whiskey becomes a shot, the one shot becomes two, and eventually it picks up critical mass until the writer has to make a choice as to how he will spend his day: writing or drinking. 

Poets get a pass - poems are short.  You can crank them out between rounds

I'm happy that I'm not ruined yet, and if I've gone this long without total disassociation, I 'm doing better than some of my friends and family who've become complete wrecks and ruin, but it's important to me that I occasionally take these breaks.  In the interest of NOT becoming a sanctimonious asshole (I just quit smoking again, that's quite bad enough) I'm not going to quit drinking - but I will keep it under control.

Of course, tonight I'll be celebrating the end of this no-booze vacation with a few strong rounds.  Cheers!

It can't happen to me - it won't happen to me