February 19, 2008
Me neither, H
When I'm lyin' in my bed at night
I don't wanna grow up
Nothin' ever seems to turn out right
I don't wanna grow up
How do you move in a world of fog
That's always changing things
Makes me wish that I could be a dog
When I see the price that you pay
I don't wanna grow up
I don't ever wanna be that way
I don't wanna grow up
Seems like folks turn into things
That they'd never want
The only thing to live for
Is today
I'm gonna put a hole in my TV set
I don't wanna grow up
Open up the medicine chest
And I don't wanna grow up
I don't wnna have to shout it out
I don't want my hair to fall out
I don't wanna be filled with doubt
I don't wanna be a good boy scout
I don't wanna have to learn to count
I don't wanna have the biggest amount
I don't wanna grow up
Well when I see my parents fight
I don't wanna grow up
They all go out and drinking all night
And I don't wanna grow up
I'd rather stay here in my room
Nothin' out there but sad and gloom
I don't wanna live in a big old Tomb
On Grand Street
When I see the 5 o'clock news
I don't wanna grow up
Comb their hair and shine their shoes
I don't wanna grow up
Stay around in my old hometown
I don't wanna put no money down
I don't wanna get me a big old loan
Work them fingers to the bone
I don't wanna float a broom
Fall in and get married then boom
How the hell did I get here so soon
I don't wanna grow up
Posted by ray at 11:39 PM | Comments (3)
February 12, 2008
I tell you the truth but you don't believe me
Back in the day I used to think this song was about being an amphetamine addict and proud of it. Lately, though, I think it's about being an over-employed full-time/sometimes single parent wannabe rescue hero biting off more than I can handle and not knowing how to say "enough".
Either way, the feedback helps keep me awake when the bugs absolutely positively must be fixed by morning for me to save face.
Bring me an 8-ball, some valium and a pint of Jameson and I'll be your special friend.
The sun comes up another day begins
And I don't even worry about the state I'm in
Head so heavy and I'm looking thin
But when the sun goes down I'm gonna start again
Uh-huh
Uh-huh
You never understand me
You never understand me, yeah, uh-huh
Posted by ray at 11:26 PM | Comments (8)
January 28, 2008
It gets better
This is difficult to write, because it's about stuff related to AA, and "anonymity is the spiritual foundation of blah blah blah", but fuck it.
A good friend of mine from college (call him E.) got in touch with me a few months ago. I knew from others that he had become a real hard case alcoholic in recent years, and I told people to tell him that if he ever wanted to, he should get in touch with me and I can tell him what I know, since I've been sober a few years. We started conversing on a regular basis since about October, and most days I talked to him he sounded relatively upbeat, but I knew he was often not being honest with me, and every time I talked to him some new facet of his life had gone wrong.
I tried real hard. We had long phone conversations about sobriety, about what works and what doesn't work, about how you can't do this alone, and at some point you have to open yourself up and let total strangers into your life to help you figure things out, and that you have to be painfully, rigorously honest when you do. But until you reach your bottom, until you hit a point where you simply hate your life enough that you are finally ready to listen to people, you're finally ready to take any desperate measure offered in order to not drink again, you will keep drinking.
My bottom was relatively high. I know others who hit what sounded to me like rock bottom before they got clean...divorce, homelessness, jail, etc. And I knew that for some unfortunate few, there was no bottom other than death.
Well, E. finally found his bottom this week. He took his own life.
I hadn't talked to him in a few weeks, not since my last visit to Austin, where I had tried and failed once again to get him to go to a meeting and meet up with my old sponsor. I was coming around to the idea that maybe he had some more drinking to do before he hit bottom, and was coming to terms with the fact that I had no more power over his drinking that I do over my own. But still, I tried my damnedest. I have that compulsive rescue hero streak in me, and I tried all the AA kung fu I knew.
I didn't hear from him for a few weeks, finally called him a couple of days ago, Friday around lunchtime, and left him a voice mail.
Now I know that by then he was already gone.
One thing he told me that haunts me, is that he said when we were in college, even though we ran in the same crowd, he always thought that I didn't like him. That I was somehow "too cool" for him, because I ran the college radio station and listened to all this weird music and he was just a regular old shmoe. When in fact the opposite was true. I loved the guy. He was so kind, so warm, so self-effacingly funny, I always loved running into him and hanging out with him. I used to have this wall up around me that was primarily shyness that I've been told over the years a lot of people mistook for arrogance. And I wonder, would E. have felt that way about me if I didn't act arrogant because of my own insecurities? Would he have talked to me sooner? Would he have called me during the last two weeks when his life apparently spiraled out of control?
I tried everything I knew, and it wasn't enough. And I will always wonder if if there was something else I could have tried, something I could have said, that could have made things click in his brain. I will always wonder if not calling him for his last two weeks was a mistake.
I know intellectually that none of this is my fault, that nothing I could do would have saved him. But in my gut, I am filled with self-doubt.
I remember one time staying up late with E. and a bunch of other people, and we were drunk and otherwise under the influence, and he was making us watch Evil Dead II, which he insisted was the greatest movie ever made. And the movie kept getting more ridiculous and he kept saying "wait, it gets better. it gets better". And it didn't get better, and he'd say, "it gets better!"...until the closing credits rolled and he said, "See? It's over. It got better."
E., man, I'm sorry that you had to get all the way to the end for it to get better. But I know that you're better now, and I'm glad you're not in pain any more. I just want you to know that when I said last month that I loved you and wanted you to get well, I meant it with all my heart.
We'll meet again.
Take care.
Posted by ray at 2:05 AM | Comments (20)
December 21, 2007
Not how it works, but at least how things are
Thanks to Ashley for this anti-rant from Craig Ferguson. I try, I don't always succeed, but I try not to make fun of fucked up addicted celebrities myself, because the only thing that kept me from being one of them was, well, celebrity.
It's long, it's heartfelt, and it's feckin' brilliant.
Posted by ray at 5:22 PM | Comments (3)
December 6, 2007
Guided
Good days are not a guarantee. They are a blessing.
Single-parenting it for a few days. Brother-in-law in town, thinking of staying. He and I and the boy and the girl dined at Vincents. Talked about movies old and new, skateboarding, pranks, music famous and obscure, sazeracs properly and improperly made, homework done and homework still to-do, and ex-girlfriends, recent and long-ago.
On the drive home the boy said "If you re-arrange the letters in Food Mart, you get Doom Fart." Ten minutes later we were still laughing and he said "I feel smart!" and we laughed some more.
By the time we got home we all agreed that "The Official Ironmen Rally Song" rules the fucking universe.
Everybody should have more good days.
bitter fish in crude oil sea
you don't have to bother me
you just have to join in on this song
crawling people on your knees
don't take this so seriously
You just have to hum it all day long
to dine alone
to build a private zone
or trigger a synapse
and free us from our traps
you won't see me turn my back
with my head against my stack
spitting teeth and breaking open skin
official ironmen you are free
champions officially
but you won't catch me on an open chin
to dine alone
to build a private zone
or trigger a synapse
and free us from our traps
save your knock-out punches for the freaks
happy little babies with red cheeks
you will rock them gently out of sync
confirmations through the wire
spitting gas into the fire
am i also worthy of a drink?
to dine alone
to build a private zone
or trigger a synapse
and free us from our traps
Posted by ray at 7:12 PM | Comments (10)
October 20, 2007
IV: Quadrophenia
"You're barmy, that's what. Staying out all hours. Gettin' up to God knows what. Dressing like a bloody freak. Stand still when I'm talking to you! I wouldn't be at all surprised if you're on drugs."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah....Haven't you got a mind of your own? I'll tell you, you're schizophrenic, you are."
"What's that then, eh?"
"I'll tell you. It's somebody, like you, who doesn't know where his mind is. Bloody split personality. Half your mother's family were the same. That's where you get it. Your Uncle Sid was always trying to kill himself. And when he did it was a bloody accident. He never knew what he was doing."
1979 was the year that Quadrophenia was released, when I was 15. I idolized this film. For obvious reasons...the music, the fashion, the rebellion. And for reasons that I didn't think anybody else really understood like I did. Split personality. One minute fun, the next moody, and the moodiness would drive friends or girlfriends away, which would make me clingy, making them run further away, making me moodier and angrier and more and more lonely. Even when I had a girlfriend, I felt isolated, like it wasn't real, like I didn't really deserve this. And if they dumped me, I would obsess over them for years. More often, I would dump them first, reject them before they could reject me. It's a useful defense mechanism. Attack before you can be attacked. Ask the Germans. 1940. A banner year.
1979, coincidentally, was also the year I started drinking. Heavily, from the very first night. I did not "experiment" with alcohol and drugs, I said "gimme!" And if you believe what some people tell you, the year an alcoholic starts drinking is the year that he stops developing emotionally.
Last week I watched Quadrophenia with my daughter, thinking I was just passing on one more bit of musical history for her so that she can be the hippest musical kid in school (it's working, so far). But as I watched, I realized I was not watching an image of my teen angst years. I was watching my current grown self on the screen, being amped up one minute and depressed the next, taking anger out at rejections, real or imagined, wanting to be part of something larger than myself and finding myself isolated at every turn, angry and confused and not knowing how to figure anything out.
Two weeks ago I almost relapsed. Not even because I wanted to get drunk, really. I was angry about something. Something stupid and petty, I don't even remember what it was. But there was a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and I picked it up, took the cork out, and smelled it. And then I put it to my lips. Thinking, "this'll show 'em." Like I could prove a point that way. I could show "them" (whoever "they" were) that I'm serious, about whatever the fuck it is I'm supposed to be "serious" about. I used to do that in my drinking days. Drink "at" people. Drink to show 'em. And I was daring myself to do it, curious to see if it was as dangerous as it's made out to be, curious in the way I was curious about letting go of the handlebars on my motorcycle last year.
I tipped the bottle back, and the wine hit my lips...but I didn't open them. And I pulled the bottle back down, and wiped my mouth. Put the cork back in the bottle, and put the bottle in the pantry out of sight. Then I called somebody, 'cause that's what you do in AA. You call somebody. I called a person who was once a temporary sponsee of mine who is currently stronger and wiser than I have been in months. The student has become the master.
And I'm hauling my ass back into meetings for real now. I have friends in the program now, friends who I know from outside activities, so it's easier to stay connected. It's kind of ironic; I get called "rescue hero" by a couple of people I've helped in the past year, I get called "fireman" by somebody who knows about my secret dream of wanting to be a volunteer fireman. And the other day in a meeting, a chick there who I didn't even know said she thought I looked like the sponsor type, like the kind of guy people must ask to sponsor them all the time. When inside I still feel like a messed-up kid half the time.
Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, I drank the last drink of my life (a pint of pink lemonade and vodka that was about 2/3 vodka) and cried my eyes out to my wife about things in my past I'd never told her about, at least not in detail. That really was my last drink. I've never relapsed, and I don't plan on doing it any time soon. And today I will get a new little AA chip (why don't they call them doubloons here?) with a big Roman numeral "IV" on it.
If it's true that your emotional development freezes when you start drinking, and starts growing again when you get sober, then today I turned 19. I feel 19. I feel like a confused teenager on the verge of young adulthood who is only just now starting to figure out what is important and what is just distraction. What parts of my past are worth hanging on to and what parts should be traded in for something else. And it's high time for me to drive the Vespa GS off the cliff and walk away from all that mods and rockers nonsense, and grow the fuck up.
I'm Ray, and I'm still a motherfucking alcoholic.
Posted by ray at 1:30 AM | Comments (16)
April 25, 2007
Addict thinking as applied to pints of ice cream
From a recent email conversation:
"and i got like 3/4 of the way through it and thought, "i'm full, i should put the rest away", but then i thought that what was left wasn't enough for a full helping next time, and i didn't want my future self to be disappointed in how little ice cream was left, so i ate it."
You tell that story to an alkie/addict, and they will know exactly what you're talking about.
Posted by ray at 7:37 PM | Comments (7)
October 26, 2006
III Redux
Wow, when I was typing my last entry a few nights back, I didn't really know where I was going with it. I've found that riding a motorcycle is a good time to think, because there are very few distractions around like cell phones or radios, and some of my thoughts just seemed kinda vaguely blogworthy.
Especially the bit about the chocolate malt chip. Seriously, have you had this stuff? It's amazing.
I appreciate all the emails and comments. I guess I should clarify that at no time was I seriously contemplating harming myself, so those of you who were worried in that direction, rest your pretty heads.
Things have a way of sorting themselves out, and I'm sure they will, but it's nice to know that people care.
Thanks, y'all.
Posted by ray at 4:27 PM | Comments (7)
October 23, 2006
III
It's been three years as of last Friday.
Unlike last year, or the year before, I don't have anything uplifting to say. I'm just not feeling it.
I'm not struggling, I don't think. I don't really have any compulsions, no monkeys on my back, other than maybe ice cream. But neither am I on some damn pink cloud any more either.
For a while I'd been kicking around the notion that maybe someday I could go back out. Just be more careful. Drink like a normie. That whole idea changed a few months ago when I was out with Maitri at some pub in the Quarter. I bought a round of drinks, and her Guinness spilled onto my can of Rockstar and down my hand, and without thinking I licked all the Guinness foam off of where it spilled.
It shot straight up into my brain and down my spine into all my nerve endings. It was electric. Almost orgasmic.
Alcohol. Wow. I'd pretty much forgotten. I'd reduced it to a distant memory, a sort of academic curiosity about myself, like my shrimp allergy. It was just something I'm not supposed to have. And it all came rushing back.
I liked that one little lick waaaaay too much.
I've been wrestling with my place in society lately. It's changed so much in the last three years, and even more since I moved. I used to be the guy that organized the pub runs, the Bigfoot beer schnocks, the Sunday afternoon darts and pints. And when I quit, I stopped calling people, and they stopped calling me. I know how it goes, I used to be the same way. You don't know whether to call up the recovering drunk and invite him out when you're gonna be drinking, in case it might somehow be rude. And so vast stretches of my social life just kind of slowly faded away.
And now we're in a new city. A city where everything revolves around booze, and where a guy who is visibly not a drinker just kind of doesn't quite fit a lot of the time. And I am the stay-at-home dad, and I have a high-pressure job, and so vast stretches of my social life just seem barely out of reach. I can see them, but I can't get to them.
Sometimes the only things that remind me what city I'm in are my lunches, and my gutting days. Which is why I'm so passionate about the gutting, and why I'm gaining weight. Another kind of gutting.
I had a majorly frustrating weekend, and I tried to finally clear my head of the crud last night by taking the Triumph out. Which led to more frustration, since the motorcycle is both 1. infrequently ridden, and 2. British, so it was a bitch to start.
I headed out to a meeting, to a place I'd never been, thinking to maybe pick up my three year chip. Turns out it was a speaker meeting, at a halfway house, and they don't do chips on speaker nights but I wasn't really feeling the love anyway. Halfway-house and rehab meetings are like that. Sometimes they can give you perspective, but sometimes they give you too goddamn much...perspective.
Afterwards I took the bike and decided to wander vaguely in the direction of Angelo Brocato's.
I was on the freeway, going way faster than I've gone on a motorcycle in at least a year, feeling the wind going up my sleeves and ballooning out my jacket, feeling my hands pulling away from the handlebars. I felt like letting go. I felt like something in the universe wanted me to let go, just to see what would happen. Do you ever get that feeling when you're looking over the edge of a great height, and you have to resist the urge to just step off the edge? I get that feeling all the time. I always have. It just fascinates me that it only takes one second of courage, or stupidity, to step off, and then you're committed and you can never take that step back.
The bike was like that. I could just let go, and maybe I would float backwards while the bike raced on ahead. Or maybe something else would happen.
Part of me wanted to find out. But more of me really really wanted a cannoli.
Maybe the Guinness was like that too. Maybe that one step is just a pint, and maybe nothing happens. Or maybe I die.
Maybe shrimp is the same way.
Angelo Brocato's was closed.
I headed back Uptown to the Creole Creamery. Thinking that it's dark, half the streetlights on St. Charles still don't work, I could hit a pothole and that would be the end of me. And I tried to remember what my last blog post was, and would it be a fitting last post. And I wondered what happens to somebody's blog when they die a premature death. Does somebody pull the plug? Or does it stay up for weeks or months while total strangers pick through the archives finding every mundane post suddenly fraught with meaning and foreshadowing? I remember thinking about this last summer when Hiromi was having her dark days. What happens to her blog? Would Karl and I, her blog maintenance man and her blog gardener, respectively, know what right thing to do if she were to leave us?
Creole Creamery was open. Chocolate malt chip is very good. I called somebody. They teach you rule number one before they even teach you the steps. Call somebody. Somebody who gets it. I know people who get it. I know people with only months under their belt who sometimes get it better than I do.
I'm OK today.
Posted by ray at 10:06 PM | Comments (33)
July 12, 2006
Step the Twelfth
AA hasn't really been in my life much during the past year. Just a few meetings, really, to pick up a chip or say hi to friends. I've been fine on my own. I haven't needed meetings, and honestly, when you don't really need them, sometimes those meetings can be real bloody boring. Annoying, even. The slogans, the cliches, the same old drunkalogue stories you've heard a hundred times before.
But self-centered thinking led me away from a tenet of AA that I forgot. Step Twelve. To take the message to other suffering alcoholics and addicts, in the hope that they too can find a way to live. And in doing so, to reaffirm your own sobriety.
Basically, I had gotten what I needed, and then I said "see ya" and never looked back.
That is until recently, when a good friend, somebody who I have grown to care about a lot over the past few months, who I had watched slip from unhappiness to despair to insanity under a barrage of pills and booze, finally hit the basement. Hard.
I've had long email conversations with this person, talking about suicide and emotional trauma and substance abuse. Sometimes I've been scared, stuck in that middle ground between needing to tell somebody and not wanting to betray confidences. Wondering if speaking out would be meddling, or if silence would equal death.
Interventions are always so easy on TV. Real life is more complicated.
The bottom came last week. And I've walked back into AA meetings, with my friend now a temporary sponsee (until a more appropriate sponsor can be found). And in trying to explain the program to a newbie, I've been able to re-examine my own complacency towards my sobriety. I've had to put into words certain thoughts I've been having that, if I'd shared them with my own sponsor, would have him calling bullshit on me.
I've become another AA cliche. Practicing the Twelfth Step has led me full circle to re-examing my attitudes towards Step One.
And if I'm totally honest with myself, I'd probably have to say "just in time".
P.S. I'd appreciate any leads on where the cool kids go to meetings in post-Katrina NOLA AA. Email is fine (ragicali at yahoo dot com). Anonymity preserved, obviously.
Posted by ray at 12:56 AM | Comments (9)
May 15, 2006
Monday absenteeism
Years after leaving all the booze and worse things behind, it's weird how certain things can still give me twinges of guilt about them, even when I've done nothing wrong.
Like every once in a while, I'll wake up with a headache, and my first thought will be, "Shit, how much did I drink last night, and where did I leave the car?", and it'll take me a few minutes before I remember, "Wait, I don't drink any more. I just have a headache. Cool!" I'm like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life jumping around yelling "My mouth's bleeding! My mouth's bleeding! What do you know about that?" It's just a headache, and gee whillikers I didn't do anything to deserve it. It just happened.
Then there is the Monday stomach virus. Somewhat amongst drinkers, and even more so amongst abusers of the wakey-wakey class of drugs, Monday is hell day, the day you're most likely to call in sick to work because there's no way you can get yourself into any kind of condition to be seen by the normies. And the best thing to call in sick with on those days is the "stomach virus/food poisoning" gambit. If you just say "I'm home sick", somebody wants to know, "Aw, is it that head cold going around? Do you have that cough?" and you end up having to do too much explaining.
But if you say "stomach virus", you shut down all further inquiry. That alone conveys more than anybody wants to know. It's "OK, get better, see you tomorrow".
Besides, in the tech business, it's not like Monday absenteeism actually gets you out of anything. If you miss a day of work, the whole schedule doesn't shift one day to accomodate. They're gonna take it out of your hide late nights and weekends as it is.
So here it is. Monday. I haven't had a drink in years. I haven't had anything worse than a drink in well over a decade. And I've got an honest-to-God incapacitating "Sweet Jesus what the hell did I EAT?!" stomach virus. Have lost five pounds since yesterday morning. I can use a stopwatch to time how long a glass of Gatorade makes the complete journey.
And it's hard for me to not feel just the slightest bit guilty. I'm just conditioned. I'm at home feeling like shit on a Monday, and part of me still wants me to think it's my fault, that some sin of mine brought me to this terrible fate.
I'm living on Gatorade and Saltines.
When what I really want is Amburgers and Woot Beer.
Posted by ray at 11:33 AM | Comments (9)
December 9, 2005
Sober Santa
There goes my productivity for the rest of the day.
Use your keyboard arrows. My high score is 512.
Via Poppy.
Posted by ray at 1:26 PM | Comments (7)
September 7, 2005
Austin shelter Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
AA meetings are being held daily at the Austin Convention Center shelter, outside the doors of the Medical Triage room.
The schedule that is posted there reads as follows:
7:00am
8:00am
10:00am
noon
2:00pm
4:00pm
6:00pm
8:00pm
Posted by ray at 1:19 AM | Comments (0)
July 15, 2005
Burma Addendum
Turns out the Mission of Burma profile on Myspace is actually being run by Roger Miller himself, and Clint Conley also has a profile there.
I sent Clint an email the other day, since he and I have some fairly important things in common...he had his own struggles with alcohol and other substances back in the day and has been sober for a long time.
The reunited Burma played in Austin at La Zona Rosa during SXSW 2004, when I had less than six months under my belt, and it was my first time back in a nightclub after having given it all up. So I was a little nervous, to be honest. Am I going to want to drink? Am I going to have fun? Am I going to be miserable and bored?
Turns out I had a blast. (It also turns out that most people at the club don't drink nearly as much as I remember they did. Who knew?) But it was a special added bonus knowing that another sober guy was there, too, up on stage playing the bass in typically monstrous fashion.
So today I get a very nice email back from Clint. These Burma fellas, despite being rock gods walking the earth, are very nice regular guys as well.
Clint has a band of more recent vintage, Consonant, which also features former Bedhead and Codeine members. I haven't heard it, but I plan to go out and buy some this weekend.
Burma tonight at Emo's. If you're in Austin, absolutely do not miss this show.
Posted by ray at 3:15 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
Father's Day 2001
Father's Day 2001 was one of those turning points in my drinking history. It wasn't the day I got sober. That would take a couple more years. But it was the beginning of the end of my thinking that I could live this way forever.
Morning was the usual ritual for Mother's/Father's day. Brunch at home, with mimosas. My family bought me a dart board. At the time I was a hardcore beer geek and amateur dart geek; my main hobby was putting away pints and shooting darts at the Gingerman or the Dog & Duck with my friends James and Mark and Mike and Mike and Bill.
I was still in that frame of mind where I knew I would have to quit some day, but I was still waiting for that big event that would make it plain as day. Sooner or later I'd get liver cancer, or wreck my car, or get a DUI, or something, and then I would know that it was time to quit. (Sounds goofy now, doesn't it? It made perfect sense back then, and lots of ex-drunks I talk to now remember thinking exactly the same thing.)
So after drinking mimosas all morning, we set the dart board up in the garage and played darts with the kids. And shit, you can't play darts without drinking beer, so over the course of the afternoon I put away a 6-pack of Fat Tire. Somewhere along the way I vaguely remember promising the kids that we'd go to the pool.
Around 7:00pm, my wife wakes me up from my nap to tell me that they're going to the pool, with or without me. I told them to go without me. I was way too drunk, and I was getting that awful "I drank too early in the day" kind of daylight hangover.
And the guilt just crushed me. What a dorky Afterschool Special kind of thing to do. I made promises on Father's Day that I couldn't keep because I was too drunk.
It was the last straw. I told Gina I was going to quit. Not just for a month this time, not just for Lent, but for good.
A week later we went to a party at James & Mark's house, where I had a perfectly awful time, white-knuckling through it and pounding down Cokes non-stop. I had already backed off the notion of giving it up forever and decided that I was just going to give it up for a whole year. You know, see all the seasons change, experience all the holidays sober, just to see what it's like. It sounded refreshing. It sounded cleansing.
I got through an entire week in Wyoming with the in-laws and didn't drink anything. But it was calling me. I still walked through the beer section at the grocery store just to gaze at all the local microbrews that I would never have a chance to taste.
By the end of July, I had found a reason to drink. Just one time. Cassidy had gotten lost in the woods in Tacoma, police had to be called to find her, and the stress was overwhelming. It was also the perfect excuse. I decided, and Gina agreed, that I could drink on vacation in Tacoma, this one time, and still stay on the wagon at home in Austin.
A month after getting home to Austin, I found another reason to drink. I don't even remember what it was, but it seemed important at the time. A few weeks later, 9/11 happened, which of course called for a couple of bottles of wine to numb the pain. A few weeks after that, my company had the first massive layoffs to signal the end of the tech boom. More wine.
By November I was pretty comfortable with the notion that I should be able to drink once a week. I don't even remember the reasoning behind it; it was just "oh well". It was the new standard. Once a week. Or twice, depending.
Within six months, I was back to drinking almost every night, hangovers a couple times a week, drunk behind the wheel, etc, etc, etc.
By summer of 2003, I was a physical wreck. I weighed almost 250 pounds, my face was broken out, my total cholesterol was 240, I won't even get into the gastrointestinal stuff. Many bottles of wine a week, plus a few six packs. On top of that a bottle of scotch would typically last me less than two weeks. And that was just what I drank at home. I also drank at every meal in restaurants, at work every Friday afternoon, at least one night a week out with the guys.
And this when I had sworn off it forever.
This is what you call "quitting on your own". This is what you call "exerting self-control".
I'm still planning to write a blog entry picking apart the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode where they try to debunk AA, but their main theme was that AA is bullshit, and everybody who quits drinking does it on their own.
I love Penn & Teller, but they're idiots on this one. And every Father's Day is like a little reminder to me of how wrong they are.
Posted by ray at 9:58 PM | Comments (4)
May 19, 2005
The Holy Grail Of Alcoholism Does Not Exist
This article on MSNBC caught my eye the other day, but it's taken me a little while to put my finger on why it annoyed me.
A group of 20-something drinkers seemed to lose the urge to binge-drink when they took pills made from kudzu, that ubiquitous vine that blankets the South, researchers reported.The finding, described as groundbreaking by one expert, might one day lead to a way to attack the binge-drinking problem.
Researcher Scott Lukas, with Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, had no trouble finding volunteers for the study, which required them to hang out in an "apartment," complete with television, recliner and fridge stocked with beer. This apartment-style laboratory was set up in the hospital, and the volunteers were told to spend a 90-minute session drinking beer and watching TV.
Those who took kudzu pills drank an average of 1.8 beers per session, compared with the 3.5 beers consumed by those who took a placebo.
Lukas was not certain why, but speculated that kudzu increases blood-alcohol levels and speeds up its effects. In other words, the drinkers needed fewer beers to feel drunk.
What seems wrong about this is that Lukas has lost sight of the forest for the trees. He's so focused on a single metric (reducing the number of drinks during the 90 minute test period) that he has forgotten everything we know about the nature of addiction.
Look, alcoholics do not drink until they reach some logical level of buzz and then stop. Alcoholics drink. Period. Until something makes them stop. Either it's too late at night or they run out of booze or the bars close or they pass out or somebody makes them stop. It has nothing to do with how drunk you are. The compulsion to drink will sometimes run out after three beers, sometimes after a couple of bottles of wine, and sometimes only after complete and utter blackout. The only predictable thing about the compulsion is that it is in control and you are not.
A lot of times you'll hear the wish "if only I could drink like normal people". I've come to believe, from talking to other alcoholics, that this wish is more of a mirage. I don't want to drink like normal people. Normal people do it wrong. Normal people say dumb shit like "No more for me, thanks, I'm starting to feel it" halfway through their second glass of wine. I don't want that. I want to get blotto. I want to completely cut lose, take the brakes off and suck the stuff down with abandon, without fear of consequences.
That's because I'm an alcoholic. That's how I drink. That's why I can't drink any more.
I wonder if Dr. Lukas did any follow-up interviews. Because I can guarantee you that at least some minority of his subjects were alcoholics. And of that that alcoholic minority, I will bet good money that some of them, maybe even most of them, when they went home from their 90 minute study, you know what they did? Already with their first taste of the day, with a little lingering buzz still in their system? They went home and continued the drinking. A bunch of them in fact probably got good and hammered.
Because that's what we do. And no pill in the world is going to change that.
Posted by ray at 11:45 AM | Comments (7)
April 20, 2005
18 Months
Eighteen months ago today, I was hungover like a dog from the party we had had the night before, but I was hoping it was for the last time, because I had resolved a few weeks before that to quit after the party was behind us.
Three days later I wandered into my first AA meeting.
I have no idea how I have managed to stick with it, but I have, and I hope I don't ever go back, because this is so much better than I ever thought it could be.
I won't get a chance to make a meeting to get my chip until Saturday. I want to make sure I pick it up from the Liar's Club meeting at Spider House, since a lot of those guys were there for me during my worst months, and Saturday is the first Spider House meeting I'll be able to make.
To my friends: if you helped me during the past 18 months, thank you. If I helped you, I'm glad. And if you're a total stranger reading this and you want to quit but think you can't, just drop by Spider House some time, Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday at noon. If those guys could do it, and if I could do it, then you can do it.
Posted by ray at 10:35 AM | Comments (6)
April 4, 2005
Daylight Savings
Most of my life, on the Monday after we changed the clocks in the spring I'd hear people complain about how tired they were in the morning, how their body hadn't adjusted yet, how they should still be in bed.
And I always thought "what a bunch of wusses"". It's only an hour, and you had Sunday to adjust. I never got why people thought their body clock should have such an effect.
Now I know. And now I know why I didn't know then.
See, for most of my life I was a drunk. So on that first Monday morning of daylight savings time, like every other morning of my life, I had only one of two feelings. Either (most likely) I drank too much the night before, and so I was hungover and felt like shit. Or, I didn't drink anything the night before, and so I was feeling all spunky and wonderful like I always did on my rare non-hangover days. (I was also pretty much guaranteed to get good and ripped later that night, seeing as how I would need to celebrate feeling so good.)
The only exception to this rule were the amphetamine years, where of course Monday I felt like anybody would who had been snorting speed instead of sleeping since the previous Thursday.
So you can see why having my wake-up call moved by an hour was only kind of a blip in the full panoply of abuses competing for hunting rights to my brain cells.
This year, though...no booze, no speed, not even any psych meds any more. And you know what? I was sleepy. At 8am standing in the breakfast taco line, I felt like I should still be in bed. I felt like my body hadn't adjusted yet.
Ain't it cool? I'm becoming healthy. I'm becoming a wuss about sleep like the rest of you normies.
In slightly related news, today was session #3 on the tattoo, at 9am. Poor Chris wasn't adjusted to the time change either, so we didn't get rolling until after 10. He filled in more of the waves up the back of my arm and around the back to the inside. I'll post pictures as soon as I can get Gina to take some. The pictures I posted back in February look pretty lousy compared to how it looks now, all cleaned up with some shading in it.
Posted by ray at 5:59 PM | Comments (2)
October 24, 2004
As it turns out, nobody noticed that I just drank cranberry juice the whole time, except the waitress, who seemed to have trouble grasping the notion that I wanted "just" cranberry juice. Idjit. I hope she's in one of those good husband-hunting sororities, because she ain't gonna make it on her brains.
I also found out, to my disappointment, that an ex-coworker of mine who I always thought was really smart, fairly hot, and had a bad attitude in a good way...is voting for Bush. Because (get this) "there hasn't be another attack since 9/11 so he's doing a good job with homeland security".
Christ. When somebody who is smart enough to have a degree in finance and is working on a second degree in computer engineering can have such obviously stunted skills in basic logic, I start losing hope.
Posted by ray at 9:39 AM | Comments (0)
October 22, 2004
Coming out of the closet
So most of you know that I'm a recovering alcoholic. I may have in the distant past drunk some of you under the table without even trying. And this week I'm celebrating one year sober.
Today, though, I have have some weird feelings about this. I've been out of the closet with my sobriety ever since last spring, when I was pretty sure it was gonna take, but I've never announced it from the treetops. When it comes up in conversation, I mention it, casually, without shame, without drama.
But today I'm going to happy hour with the engineering crew from the company I just got laid off from. And you know what? None of them know I don't drink. They all knew me from the company before that, where I was known as a drinker, as a beer geek, as the guy who was always the last one to leave the quarterly company parties. Not necessarily a drunk, since I managed to surround myself with guys who drank almost as much as me, in order to blend in. They have no idea that by the time I started working at this most recent company, I had already been sober for three months, and it never really came up the whole time I worked there.
So I have to out myself today, because I know that when I show up, the VP of Engineering is going to thrust a margarita or a Shiner Bock into my hand, and I'm going to have to turn it down. Now this VP is a great guy. Funny, smart, talented. He's also kind of macho. Weightlifter. Type A personality. Likes to flirt with the waitresses and make sure that you notice how good he is at it. You know the type. He doesn't really like signs of weakness in people, and though he will joke about your failures and failings in a good-natured-ribbing sort of way, there is always the slightest undercurrent of something else. You know that he's identified the weakness, and you know that he won't forget that it's there.
What this means is that when I out myself, I have to convey not weakness, but strength. I'm not weak because I can't drink any more. I'm stronger. I'm healthier. I'm smarter.
At least I hope I am. I keep telling myself I am, and most days I believe myself.
At any rate, it's a good day to ride the Triumph. Nothing brings out your inner bad-ass like riding up on the same British iron that Steve McQueen rode in "The Great Escape", that Marlon Brando rode in "The Wild One".
We shall see.
Posted by ray at 3:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2004
Shiny Happy People
Somebody tell me where the party at!
Someone tell me where the party at!
Right here!
Somebody tell me where the party at!
Someone tell me where the party at!
Right here!
Now, jump, jump, come on, jump jump jump jump...
First day of the ACL fest was today. I rode the Triumph down so that I could skip the whole shuttle bus routine (riding in shorts...I am SO bad). Caught up with Mike and Dale and John from Vignette, and watched Neko Case during the hottest part of the afternoon. I love Neko Case. Not her music...well, I love her music too, but I mean I love her. I want to bear her children.
After Neko, I found my old buddy Kristi at the Austin Kiddie Limits tent and we watched Trout Fishing In America do the absolute funniest kids music show I've ever seen. We hung out with some other Rice alums, watched a little of Broken Social Scene, then hit the food booths.
If there is one thing that the festival has made drastic improvements on every year, it's the food. The first year there were horrendous lines for basically the same old festival crap you'd get at Eeyore's or the Old Pecan Street festival. Sausage wraps, some average BBQ, roasted corn, turkey legs.
Last year was an improvment with lots of quality local food.
But now...the surprise of the day was that the mighty Prejean's of Lafayette was there. And there was no line for them, because people in Austin aren't hip enough to have heard of them. Only Louisiana natives and Jazz Fest die hards were sucking up their food. We'd walk right by the long line for Waterloo Ice House and not have any wait at all for Prejean's quail & andouille gumbo, crawfish enchiladas, and crab & crawfish stuffed mushrooms. Damn, it was good.
After dinner and a quick pee, we were going to walk back and watch Toots & the Maytals and then Franz Ferdinand. But I noticed that the Rebirth Brass Band was about to start in the gospel tent, and I tried to explain to Kristi how cool they were, but I could tell she wasn't buying it. "You mean they're like jazz?" She agreed to go check out a few songs and then we'd leave.
Ha!
Now she's in the Cult of the Rebirth.
If you've never seen a New Orleans brass band, you cannot comprehend the true meaning of The Funk. Seven horn players, two drummers. Maceo's horns, hardcore P-Funk beats, New Orleans street musician soul, hip-hop muthafuckin' attitude. This is the funkiest music on the planet and YES I have seen Maceo a half-dozen times and YES I have been to the Mothership both with AND without Bootsy and YES I have seen James Brown in a small blues club in Houston and YES I am saying that none of those compare to a hot summer night in a gospel tent crammed in tight in a horde of sweaty dancing mayhem listening to Rebirth.
Earlier in the day, Kristi and I had been debating whether shiny was good. Shiny as in hot tattooed chick at the gym who's been on the Stairmaster for an hour. Shiny as in shirtless skater dude in the park. Yeah, OK, we're talking about sweaty. But not just sweaty. A certain kind of sexy sweaty that we couldn't describe as anything other than shiny. And we had decided that, yes, shiny was good.
Well, there were a lot of shiny people dancing to Rebirth tonight. Shiny, smiling, happy people bumping butts with total strangers. Not many people know about the New Orleans brass band thing, but those who know and GET it are like people in a cult. The church of the organic brass butt funk. There is nothing like it.
Kristi is in the church now. I couldn't drag her out til Rebirth was done. She's been reborn. She's hooked.
After that, we checked out Franz Ferdinand. I had to see them, first, because the program mentioned them in the same breath as Jesus & Mary Chain, and second, because they were from Glasgow, and I knew my Orkut buddy Kat (who lives there) would kill me if I had a chance to see one of her local bands and decided to pass. They were very cool in a jerky tense early 80's post-post-punk kind of way...choppy like Echo & the Bunnymen or Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, but without the doom and gloom. And they closed out with a couple of songs that would have sat well with Eno's Roxy Music. Fucking rocked.
It was also packed, considering it was only the first day. Tomorrow will be unbelievable. The Franz Ferdinand show was more crowded than even Wilco was last year, and they weren't even on one of the main stages. We bugged out early after that; I gave Kristi a lift to her car on the Triumph (not even a helmet for me! I am SO going to biker safety fascist hell for this.)
And get this: completely and utterly sober. I discovered, to my delight, that I can dance without being drunk off my ass. Who knew? Who fucking knew? And why didn't they tell me years ago?
I'm gonna go soak my feet and turn in.
More tomorrow.
Posted by ray at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2004
Austin City Limits
Got my wristband for the Austin City Limits festival today. Just waiting in line at the box office the day before the festival was grueling enough. No shade, 95 degrees. It's gonna be a hot one.
On the other hand, it's shaping up to be a great annual event. On my must-see list this year are Wilco, Old 97's, Elvis Costello, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, North Mississippi All-Stars, Cat Power, Los Lonely Boys, and Neko Case. Hopefully we'll get at least a little cloud cover, but it doesn't look too likely.
It will also be the first time I do a big music event like this completely sober. Last year I was pretty much plastered both Friday and Saturday. Drinking Miller Lite, no less. Do you have any idea how much Miller Lite it takes to get an experienced alcoholic even a little buzzed? Never mind a drunk whose tastes ran to Islay single malts and strong Belgian beers.
But last year's festival was what planted the final seed in my brain about finally doing something about my drinking. I had finally caught up with my friends Ellen and Andrew at the Martin Sexton show. Never heard of the guy, but Ellie raved about him, so I figured I'd check him out. Honestly, I thought it was just kind of OK singer-songwriter stuff...until he did this song called "Wasted":
Any time of the year
I'd walk a country mile
A pint and a bag in my pocket
Characterized my style
I was wasted not strong as I am now
So wasted not strong as I am now
Always the beautiful son
Always a pack of my friends
Always the worry and trouble
For that sweet buzz that always ends
When you are wasted not strong as I am now
So wasted not strong as I hope I am now
Forty feet up in this pine tree
In a fortress made of scrap wood
Marvel comics, playboys, bongs
Make a 10 year 12 year 16 year old boy feel good
Then there came that day
When my tree house finally fell
I said good-bye to my friends in the woods
All those brothers that would never tell
We were so wasted not strong as we are now
Oh we were so wasted so wasted so wasted
And I remember standing there in the late afternoon sun, can of beer in my hand, another one getting warm in my backpack, thinking that I can't do this much longer, and that what he has in that song sounds real good, and sounds like something I might be able to do.
But not just yet. Because I had some serious drinking events I still had to get through first. I kept at it for another month, in fact. And when I finally quit, and I finally went to my first AA meeting...well, I wasn't dealing well, but I knew if I didn't do it this time, I would never do it, I would just be a drunk until I died. And I bought a copy of the Martin Sexton CD, skipped out of work one day and drove around all afternoon, listening to the song over and over on the radio, reading my AA book in the park, and basically having one long non-stop anxiety attack.
That particular hell didn't stop until about two weeks into my "sobriety", when I finally got me a sponsor at Spider House, got some anti-depressents from my GP, and managed to escape to a more level plane where I could deal with this new life I was trying to figure out.
I never listened to that Sexton song again, until last week when I was making a mix CD for an Orkut friend of mine. I listened once. Can't do it again. It brings back the anxiety. It makes my brain spin. That song is beautiful, but it's tainted for me, because I don't have the meds any more to bring me back from spiralling down into the pit. I'll have to make a copy of that CD for myself, minus one song, I guess.
So I'm going to ACL Fest again this weekend. Same deal, I'll be with family one day, roaming alone looking for friends the other two days. But no beer. I've got a new thing for energy drinks now. Maybe they'll have a Sobe booth or something, and I can get all likkered up on guava nectar and choline. And dance around like a complete idiot, as only a sober guy can.
Posted by ray at 3:40 PM | Comments (0)
May 31, 2004
Kicking For Good
Look out my window what do I see
A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me
All the nightmares came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay
My internal life the past few weeks has been dominated by one thing: trying to kick after six months on Lexapro.
My GP prescribed this stuff for me last November after about two minutes of diagnosis. He said even if I'm not clinically depressed, it might help me get over the rough spots I'd been having with my recent sobriety (I quit drinking in October.) He said it was known to have fewer side effects than most SSRIs. He failed to mention that it was something that he wanted me to take for six to twelve months at a minimum. And he said, and the nurse reiterated, that it was absolutely 100% not addictive.
Well, turns out they're both big fucking liars.
It really did help me over the rough patches, but after a while it was the side effects that dominated my experience with it. Morning nausea and grogginess, anorgasmia (look it up) were well-documented side effects. Weird acne and lumps on my scalp were not.
So I insisted that after six months, I was getting off. And the only advice he had for me was "try to taper off gradually over the course of a week or two".
Well, it's been six weeks. I tapered down to 1/4 my normal dosage by ten days ago, and stopped entirely on Friday night.
Six weeks of nausea. Dizziness. Vertigo. Night sweats. Weird vision snaps. Headaches. Lethargy. Buzzing in my head. Teeth grinding. Inability to concentrate. Sometimes so bad I have to come home from work and crawl into bed.
I am an architect at a 30-person software startup, coming up on a critical product release and angling for our second round of funding. I do NOT have time for this shit.
The only way I've found that I can make the sickness go away is exercise. Manic, intense, long periods of exercise. I go to the gym for two or three hours sometimes. And it's the weirdest thing. I'm sure you've read about people who can lose themselves in exercise, who go inside themselves. Marathon runners, for instance. I've never been able to do that. Exercise was something to get through, to make myself finish. Until now.
Now, I am not just exercising because it's good for me. I am doing battle with demons. I am chasing dragons out of my blood. I am crushing malignant spirits with the bench press. I am vanquishing these soul sucking little dementor fucks through sheer force of will. I'll do a set of heavy weights and the world will retreat, just a little, and it will take with it that metallic NNGGGGGGGG noise in my head. Just a little farther away. And when I finish a set, I sit up and I feel like Martin Sheen walking out of Colonel Kurtz's hut at the end of Apocalypse Now, carrying a machete and covered in blood and dazed at what has transpired. I am dazed. I am still dizzy, but now it's a good dizzy. I'm not dizzy and sickly sitting in front of my computer, I am dizzy because I am strong and I am fighting and I will destroy this sickness in my brain. And then the nausea comes back a little, and I lay down and I do another set.
And I can sit here a few hours later, and I know I feel better than I would if I had never left the house. And I know I will feel sick again before bedtime. And worse in the morning. And I'll do the whole thing over again.
I have no idea for how long. Because, remember, Lexapro is not addictive. My doctor says so. The drug company says so. The only people who think it's addictive are the thousands of people out there that are trying to quit (I found them through Google). And none of them know how long this will last either. Judging from what people tell me, anywhere from two weeks to a year.
I have no idea if I can be a warrior for a year. But I did it today, and I'm pretty sure I can do it tomorrow.
Posted by ray at 8:57 PM | Comments (0)