Alcohol, My Best Friend

There's one thing that alcohol does effectively: makes you feel less alone.

I'm not saying that drinking alcohol is a way to beat loneliness, at least not all the time, but it does provide a level of certitude, drama, and general mental warmth.  Even a hangover is something to get over, something to coax away, to work on, and allows one to avoid stunning isolation, myopia, and depressed-type living that can very well occur when sober.

Perhaps that is one aspect of becoming sober that is not desirable.  There's no running away from cold hard reality, or at least it isn't as easy as it used to be.  Go home and drown your troubles?  In what?  If you can't find the bottle, yee old friend from many years, exactly who keeps you warm at night?  Who can ever keep you as warm as alcohol?  Alcohol is total ego deluge.  It is the capacity to be totally self-focused.  Nobody will ever give that to us in the same way as alcohol, and if they do, well, there will be costs to pay later on down the road.  Healthy relationships are not evinced via modeled alcohol-relationships, even though, or especially because, alcohol feels so right, so righteous, so morally pure and correct, like diving in to what one is supposed to be and swimming in light playful energy.

It is the bliss of full emotional engagement that alcohol provides, and that no alcohol doth not provide easily.  One must earn such engagements, and only by getting sober does it become fully clear that using alcohol for many years is like buying them all on credit and blind-folding oneself until the next binge.

Fuck what the doctors are saying about my liver enzymes, what my boss said when I got fired, what my wife said moments after the grainiest most vicious manipulative frothed evil fight we've conjured, and mostly, fuck everybody who doesn't want what I've got, because, we all know that we don't have to change, and that our friend alcohol will just keep telling that to us as long as we want.

It doesn't have to get better.  The default is not getting better. It is something else entirely.  And until we stop drinking, we, and we know who we are, will not be able to realize how utterly backwards we've been running our lives.