I'm really quite busy these days. Work, school, graduate school applications, recovery stuff- plus I'm a vigilante at night. The days our just packed. I have about 4 important things I should be working on right now, so naturally I'm not doing any of them and am instead here at The Most Important Blog on the Internet. I left the restaurant bizarrely early this evening to go grocery shopping. 7 PM is the best time to go to the grocery store. It's all guys like me with a get-me-the-fuck-outta-here mentality. We arrive. We shop. We leave. We ask no questions, self check out is fine. No sir, I will not be needing help out.
Glancing into my shopping bag (reusable) I chuckled at the contents. Bread, milk, cream, sugar. Jesus. Where's the beer? The cigarettes? The Tylenol PM? The only thing that could have made that bag more plain would be a bottle of vanilla. Shit, I really did need vanilla for these cookies I'm baking. Christ, I'm baking fucking cookies at 9 PM again.
I must admit, when I got sober I thought that life was going to be pretty monotonous. This is not an uncommon fear for alcoholics. AA's Big Book addresses it with this question "Am I to be consigned to a life which is stupid, boring and glum?" Fortunately, the answer for me is "sort of, yes."
Well, not really. No, not quite at all actually. But there was a point in my life only a couple of years before sobriety when the life I lead today sounded dreadful. For a decade I defined happiness by how many bartenders knew my name. I gauged my success in life by how easily I could score dope and at what price. I prided myself on having the best connections (bouncers, cab drivers, waitresses). I did dangerous, dangerous things and I loved it. Life was chaotic and unpredictable. I remember waking up in a recording studio (no, I was not in a band) with a microphone in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. For a few years this was really fun.
By the time I reached my late twenties, something had changed. First of all, some of my peers began to drift away to better, more stable lifestyles. People began focusing on careers, getting married, having babies... It all sounded like hell to me, but I noticed that my priorities seemed very different from theirs. The next thing that happened was that my tolerance to drugs and alcohol changed severely. I was able to ingest about the same amount, but blackouts became a frequent problem. By the end of my drinking I was blacking out almost every time I drank. But even scarier, I was blacking out after only a couple of drinks. I would have two beers and two shots and not remember the next six beers and six shots. Whatever happened in those remaining hours was a mystery.
Every morning I had to become a private investigator of my own fucked up life. I would wake up and frantically dig through my pockets to see how much money I'd spent, find receipts to see where I'd been, read text messages for a clue about who I was with.
Several times in the winter when it's dark all the time, I would drink from 3-5 and pass out for a few hours, wake up at 8 and have no idea if it was morning or night until I turned on the television to find the news or Jeopardy.
Aside from the daily drinking mayhem, there were my ongoing employment problems and my depressing financial saga. I will write an entire 30 blog posts on how obnoxious I was to the opposite sex and what a liability I had grown to be for my friends. Life had become very tedious.
Before I got sober, I made a few last-ditch efforts to make drinking work for me. I moved back to my hometown which is 30 minutes away from Seattle and pristine and peaceful. Then, after a year, I moved further into the woods where I intended to drink heavily out of the auspices of anyone that might still care about me.
Nothing in life goes according to my plans. About two weeks after moving into my little house in the woods I nearly totaled my car. God had a brilliant idea for me. The car high-centered on it's way into a ditch at a high-speed. I was arrested for DUI (again), but the car didn't get a scratch. When I got out of jail I got the car outfitted with a breathalyzer and drove my ass to about 500 AA meetings in a year. My daily routine changed drastically.
I've never been happier.
So I'm grateful for some normalcy in my life today. But really, life is rarely boring. I have an exciting life. I am a college student (again), I work in a beautiful restaurant with talented people, I date an amazing girl and have a wonderful family. I read lots of books, see lots of movies and eat lots of cookies. When I wake up in the morning I feel rested, healthy and hopeful. And I remember where every dollar got spent the night before. Usually on ice cream and pizza.
Thanks for reading my blog. I love you.
Solid.
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