On Drinking and Quitting

[B]esoin d’écrire et besoin de ne plus [boire] s’épaulent….

-Adaptation of a line by Roland Dubillard

Written on day one of quitting drinking.  Forgive the quality if poor.

One of the problems with drinking too much is that space (places in your life) becomes stained with the filth of drunkenness.  You connect your world around you with sickness, disgust and guilt.  Some of the places you never wish to return to (i.e. that bar where you made a drunken ass out of yourself); some of them you’ll return to only when you’re drunk (i.e. the gas station down the street).

It’s also the same kind of idea behind becoming a shut-in because of the guilt you have over getting wasted and interacting with people, usually making a fool of yourself or just saying or doing things you wish you hadn’t.  You fear seeing them again.  Every morning is like the day after an office Christmas party where you got drunk, danced like a fool and hit on people you’ve barely ever talked to.  You have to go back into the office and walk past these people, probably just pretending like it never happened, but not really ever being able to forget it.  It becomes easier to just stay in your office or at your desk.  Go for walks at lunch.  Allow ten minutes or so after quitting time so that you minimize the number of colleagues you may have to share an elevator ride with.

And so it is in the life of a drinker (at least in mine): you end up just going home and getting drunk by yourself, having experiences vicariously through shows and movies, not really reading much because you’re annihilated and it’s hard to concentrate and not doing anything creative since you’re just dulling your mind (this is why Bukowski’s poetry is horrible: drunk people are seldom eloquent, articulate,  interesting or profound, just whiny and maudlin).  I will say, however, that I do a good job of cleaning when I’m drunk; but I end up doing stupid stuff when I drink too much that ruins the cleanliness, like spilling drinks or smoking cigarettes in the house.

But back to the staining of space I was talking about above.  All the space of daily life becomes connected to drunkenness.  The balconies on which I chain smoked cigarettes and from which I pissed and vomited; the daily walk to the train station is also the walk that I made the night before to depressing gas stations to buy large beers that I don’t even like just to pour down my throat and throw up on the walk back; my own living room where I’ve passed out on the floor and woken up late and dizzy, having to call off work; all the places in my life just become sickening areas filled with bad memories.

So, what is one to do?  Just drink.  Drink until you don’t care that you passed out on the floor, puked on the sidewalk or pissed off the balcony.  Do it all again.  Drink to forget your everyday.  That’s the cycle I’ve fallen into.  There are even apps on my phone I won’t open the morning after a bender because of things like stupid, endless recordings that I sent through WhatsApp, arguments I started on Reddit, bad openers that I sent on dating apps that weren’t responded to, etc.  Even looking at my history on YouTube and seeing all the videos that I don’t remember watching makes me feel bad the next day.

This all contributes to that constant guilt that drinkers are said to feel.  The guilt that gets stronger the longer you’re sober.  So just drink.

Well, I’ve been basically drunk every night for the past few months.  I’m going to try to stop.  Hopefully writing something like this will help since it’ll fill some of my time and keep me accountable for relapses.  We’ll see.  I’ll try to go to an AA meeting.  I’ve gone in the past and they are not very enjoyable.  I can write about why another time, just wanted to get something done tonight instead of drinking.

I’ll try to collect my thoughts about drinking and talk about how it’s going quitting.

Again, we’ll just see what happens.