Drunk, Interrupted

I haven’t gone four straight days sober since, at best estimate, 2002. The only reason I have any estimate is because I remember a conversation with a classmate in my apartment after we’d watched The Ring and neither of us wanted to be alone for a couple of hours. At some point before we parted ways to unplug our TVs and try to sleep, he said, “I usually have a drink every day and I feel a little weird if I don’t.” It did not occur to me at the time that I would be able to say this about myself for another twenty-four years.

Now that it’s been two weeks since my last drink, I have notes.

First, treasured and most highly esteemed Reader IV esquire, fear not for the title of this forum. This is temporary, and the world at large continues to lack the coherency and benevolence that would make me want to experience it with any more clarity than usual. I only have to give it up for thirty days to recover from a medical procedure: I have a precancerous condition that needed to be burned out of my throat, and apparently there was some cancer in there so the knives came out. The post-op email that informed me of this went on to say the cancerous node was completely removed and there’s not even a need for more testing, given the extent of the investigations leading up to the burnout. I want to stress this: three days after a preventative procedure I discovered I had had cancer and no longer had cancer in the two seconds it took to read one sentence and I still had twenty-seven days to go before the neat and powerful glass of whiskey I’m going to have at 5 p.m. on April 24th.

I also want to stress my impressions of sobriety come from the highly functional form of alcoholism I have employed over the years. Call it Catastrophe-Attentive Alcoholism: I’ve been aware enough through experience or extrapolation to set hard limits on my chemical abuses. In college I discovered that 200 milligrams of Ritalin, two joints, and ten beers will cause me to have a seizure, so I stopped doing that. Playing Super Stardust on PlayStation 4 taught me that half a glass of wine reduces my reaction time by about a fifth of a second, taking my average game run from half an hour to less than a minute. That revelation combined with the various car accidents I’ve been in, and I refuse to drive if I’ve had a sufficiently pungent whiff of tequila. When COVID lockdown hit, I immediately decreed no drinking before 6 p.m., because I knew how quickly I could spiral into 24-hour inebriation if I allowed my despair any wiggle room.

So I’ve been attentive to the immanent dangers, with half an eye on one-to-two-year downstream effects. My friends and employers were happy, my doctors not so much, and I could be relatively confident that I would outlive my parents and that’s what matters.

Since I don’t consciously want to die and I do generally hear my doctors out when they get snippy, I must have Reasons for why I keep drinking at the rate that I do. I’m on two medications I could probably get off of if I put down the bottle for good, so why don’t I? I began picking this apart several years ago.

Lightweight social nihilism is the first thing that has to go. “We’re all going to die” and “who cares anyway” and “the world is shit” are all valid positions, but I don’t hold to them in either truth or jest. I don’t want to die, I do care, I want the world to be better. Giving up in practice or as an excuse doesn’t jibe with the internal constructions I use to carry on, so this crutch won’t lean.

Socialization in general was a valid practical reason, especially for the wilting penitent I felt my peers had branded me. Loosening the tongue cures a measure of stutter and drinking rituals more egalitarian than any church service. How else was I going to make friends? Especially the kind of friends I want, who need something to do when they don’t like doing many things. Drinking around a bar or table is actively doing nothing with a glass of plausible deniability.

Once in this pattern of socializing, it’s easy to get stuck, since drunk people are very boring to sober people. Even sufficient difference in the level of drunkenness creates irritating divides, so maintaining friendships based on drinking requires maintaining compatible BAC, and transitioning a friendship into a sober setting requires getting over the hump of meeting a noticeably different person.¹[1] It’s not impossible, but state-dependent friends will remain state-dependent friends unless active efforts are made by both parties.

Having finally achieved the confidence of a mediocre white man after decades of being one, alcohol is no longer necessary to fortify my public ego, and I can abide the nuisance of drunker companions the same mild contempt I use to tolerate the bulk of humanity. So socialization is out as an excuse.

“Back medicine” was my grandfather’s justification, and as one of the last farmers who wasn’t running a multi-million-dollar enterprise on immigrant labor, we forgive him much. Lots of people live long and comfortably with a splash of back medicine: Temperance admits many unseemly companions. Still, taken on its own, it’s nothing that can’t be achieved with an Advil.

Drinking to forget has never made much sense to me, but that’s a personal problem. I have an exceptionally vivid and all but indestructible memory for events, and particularly the kind people want to forget. Drinking often brings them into sharp relief. So I didn’t have that excuse to begin with. The broader category around this is drinking to feel better about the world, but that never really happened to me outside the context of socialization, and since the majority of my drinking is effectively alone, there was never anything here for me.

My final excuse that could be mapped to a practical application was sleep. I couldn’t sleep without drinking, ergo I could not stop drinking, as not sleeping is not an option for me.²[2] A weak foundation on which to build whatever my actual reasons for drinking turn out to be, but a foundation nonetheless.

Now, what is life like completely and suddenly sober?³[3]

Not much different.

Despite having a number of friends who have quit drinking, I haven’t heard much by way of personal experience with which I might compare. Part of that is pure solipsism: I’m mostly interested in how people interact with me. I know they’re bored around drunk people, so I see them less, but most of them had to quit because they were about to die from drinking, so I’m glad that they stopped and not that curious about how they feel about it. I’ve heard more than one person say that alcohol is the only drug of which people will give you grief for not partaking; this has never been true in my social circles, which range from rural lakeside fishing parties to New York City nightlife. I’m sure it’s true somewhere, but nowhere I’ve been; in all my travels, the relentlessly peer-pressured drug is weed. Alcohol is clearly poison, everyone is justifiably proud of and humbled by those who eventually abstain.⁴[4] We assume it’s difficult to stop, but the health benefits tend to be immediate and visible, so we offer a meek “good job” and hope they stay in our lives, but understand when they don’t.

For me, the sleeping problem turned out to be a non-issue. I think over the years I stopped being able to distinguish between tired and intoxicated. I’ve actually been sleeping earlier as I’ve started to recognize sleepiness, and haven’t been playing the game of waiting for last drink and last cigarette to sync up.⁵[5] So all practical reasons for continuing to drink are gone.

Most addictions are a combination of chemical and habit. I have no withdrawal symptoms from stopping alcohol, nor markers for alcohol dependence, to the constant frustration of my doctors. As for habit, I’ve found an increased antsiness between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., which is traditionally the period when I started drinking. I’m not sure what to do with myself in these hours. It’s too late for coffee, and I have to wait it out until I get to the moment when I traditionally remember I should be drinking more water, so I drink more water and the evening syncs back up with its legacy time allocations.

My congenital tremor has improved slightly, so boy is my face red, after years of irritably claiming alcohol has nothing at all to do with the condition. It has not, however, vanished, and the frequency of my spasms has not receded to a point that improves my ability to navigate life. Soldering still requires the six articulated arms clamped to my desk and more patience than a middle-class person can reasonably be expected to have. Cutting an onion is still not something I attempt without another human nearby ready to take to me to the hospital.

I have more energy. I used to joke that I either don’t get hangovers or I don’t know what it’s like to not have a hangover. Looks like I don’t get hangovers, or whatever I feel prior to getting coffee in the morning is mild enough to be attributed to not having had coffee. But I do have more energy, and feel vaguely healthier, except after 8 p.m. when I’m forced to contend with the daily aches and pains I usually treat with alcohol. However, it’s energy I don’t want, and this is most likely the buried pseudo-practical cause of my quarter century of alcoholism.

Once I have a drink, I’m finished. Can’t drive, won’t work, won’t be able to metaphorically focus on reading until long after I can’t physically focus on words well enough to read. The day has come to a close, a demarcation between Doing Life Well Enough and Watching Law and Order Reruns. Leaving work used to have that flavor, working from home diluted it, and leaving the workforce entirely has excised it, but not as much as may seem obvious. I was never interested in the emotional or social expectations of my employers; the more important element of the drink was its license to let me to stop expecting anything more from myself. I’m about ten minutes from spiraling mania and depression at all times, and that has always been wrapped up in how I’m spending my diminishing supply of existence. Once I have a drink I’m spending that supply on wine, and the wine is delicious and aromatic and bittersweet and hits my stomach with a Warm like nuzzling a cat in winter. The day is over and I sink into the arms of an internal embrace and know I can drop my head straight into the interstitial oblivion whenever I feel ready to start the next day.

Yet it’s no escape. Taking the mean of good nature, I present as happier without drinking. I’m not sure if I am, as I’m not sure what happiness means. Public affect aside, there is an honest relaxation behind one or two drinks at the end of a good day, and this is no longer accessible. Maybe it was before, and chemical abuse has shut down the natural route to it. I don’t remember. Whatever addled meditations are unlocked, they’re hardly worth the cost: Alcohol makes porous the walls holding parts of me better left in the dark. They’re sad and angry parts, valid reactions to the world and my run in it, held in balance by the coordinated effort and necessary optimism demanded for getting through a day and pretending to plan the next. Crippling the ability to coordinate upsets the balance, and the sadness often wins the ensuing melee. Sometimes I want it to win a little victory: can’t keep it quiet forever, and letting it out settles it for a while. Sometimes I don’t care what happens. I just don’t want to make the effort anymore. I don’t want to coordinate. I want the chaos to boil and see if manic glee beats out despair before it fades to black. It’s a way to fight myself. Sometimes I win.

1 There are exceptions to this. I have several friends who undergo no personality changes whatsoever under the influence of any common drug. They consume and consume until they go home or spontaneously collapse in place.

2 For reasons briefly outlined here.

3 That’s for real sober, because I haven’t been able to get high since 2003; see previous sidenote.

4 Though we remain oddly incredulous of those who never try.

5 It’s the cereal v. milk problem, but worse for you, depending on the cereal.