This post is DIRTY!

What a great day. This quarter I've been taking an early morning ferry to school. I'm only in class on Mondays and Wednesdays, but I wake up at 5:30 to catch a 7:05 boat into Seattle. The early morning commuters are a special kind of worker. I take some mild pleasure in being the Wild Card in the morning deck by sitting in somebody else's regular seat or making loud, mildly inappropriate jokes at 7 AM with people I run into. I greatly amuse myself. My ego knows no bounds. My ego permeates every corner of the world. If you traveled to the Grand Canyon and hiked to the bottom, you would still hear me laughing at my own penis humor. Fortunately, with Facebook woven into the modern American quilt, I can ask you to pull my finger from thousands of miles away.

But I digress. Let's start again.

What a great day. I stepped off the early ferry boat and bounded up the hill to the community college for my 8:30 AM class. We were getting New York rain today. Torrential, drenching, filling rain. As corny as it sounds, I smiled. Because today I have the choice to walk to school in the rain. Three years ago I woke up several times to find myself caked in mud. I had fallen down the wet driveway in the rain the night before. (Go ahead, laugh. It's okay, I don't mind.) The house I was living in had a steep driveway with an even steeper embankment on the side. In the dark, I would drunkenly fall down the hill and roll into the ditch. Sometimes it would happen a few times before I made it to the top. I would stroll inside, mortify my roommates with my muddy and drunk appearance, slink into bed soaking wet and pass out. In those days, I had long hair and it would hang in front of my eyes and give me a maniacal look.

Today I don't have to live that way. Today I get haircuts regularly (thanks, Tara!), today I am a student, today I don't drink. At All. Ever.

It's hard to remember how all of this started. When I lived in that same house- which was appropriately on Moran Road (get it, like moron, but stupider)- I would take the bus to work. Often times during my morning walk to the bus stop I would have a little pep talk with myself. "Okay, rent is due this weekend. You're not going to drink today. You're going to save your money. Just go straight home after work." But inevitably I would end up sitting on the same bar stool, drinking away the rent. This is certainly not an indictment of the bar or it's tenders, many of whom I'm pleased to call friends today (Thanks, Dan!). But that was an ugly last year of drinking. My falls were getting worse. I woke up with a gigantic, swollen knee after I fell down in traffic one day. The shakes were getting worse. One day my best friend asked me "we're best friends, right? So, we can talk about anything, right?" I knew what was coming. He wanted to talk about my drinking. I was so used to this by now. I lined up all my excuses like loading a shotgun (I'm just blowing off steam, that break up was really hard on me, I'm sorry man), but he didn't say anything about my drinking. What he said was far more significant. It will be the greatest reminder of my life that year. "You smell terrible. You- and your bedroom- smell like B.O., stale booze and cigarettes. I'm sorry man. Other people are talking about it."

I died. Inside, I just wilted. This is what my life had become. I was smelly and the last good qualities I had were fading. I wasn't healthy and handsome anymore. I was stinky and gaunt. I weighed 140 pounds. I was penniless, barely holding onto a job I hated, pushing my oldest and greatest friend away.

In my Pharmacology class we're learning about the different "types" of alcoholics and the phases of addiction. I was every type of alcoholic from maintenance to binge drinker and my addiction had one phase- the pathetic phase. Yes, drinking was fun for a long time. But from my earliest years I've been disappointing, worrying and upsetting people. They were fearful with good reason too. I was up to no good from a young age and I drank like I was born to do it. In my line of work I see a lot of drinking. Last night I saw some really polite, nice people get together for dinner and wine. My drinking didn't look anything like that. I would try hard to disguise it as something "social", but the only thing social about drinking straight whisky from the bottle at 8:30 AM was that I was often logged onto Facebook while I did it. If I was a "social drinker", and I tried hard to convince people that I was, than I had the most active social life imaginable. It was a social life that happened in bathrooms at work, in brown bags on Greyhounds, in alleys outside of bars. I once distinguished myself from the other drunks drinking in the park alone at 1 o'clock because I had a job (a job I was about to show up for drunk). They were just homeless, unemployed bums. I was different.

Somebody from my not too distant past wrote me a letter from jail last week. She was always a poet and this letter is a gem. I might save it forever.

My relationship with drugs fulfilled the Old Testament like prophecy "jails, institutions or death." The first two, being God's tools, manifest in my life... God has intervened on my part in protecting me from homelessness, drug use & drug overdose.

Beautiful. I don't know what, where, why, when or how God intervenes or if this is God's intervention, but I know the sentiment. 30 months ago I hastily found a new place to live. It was amazing luck that I found a perfect one bedroom house for a really low price. I had recently acquired a vehicle too. I knew that I was fucked. It took less than two weeks before I started drinking and driving. One night I was driving home to my new rental in the woods and God intervened. I nearly totaled the car by putting it in a ditch. But the car high-centered on the way into the ditch before any damage was done to it. No damage. I stood by the car and tried to dig it out for hours. It was December 9, at 2 AM and it was pouring rain. I rolled in the muddy ditch and spun the wheels trying to back out until the police found me two hours later. I could have walked away before they show up, but something kept me there. When the police found me I was muddy, soaking and shivering. I was ready.

The rain never bothers me. Today I was given the choice to walk to school in the rain. What a great day. When I got home from school I was tired. I sank into the silence of the little house that I only lived in drunk for about two weeks. I have no drinking history here. It is my sober sanctuary. Today my life is quiet, peaceful and boring, but it is never cold, muddy or wet unless I want it to be. I frequently do.

Thanks for reading my blog. I love you.