I Think That's It -

From now on I'll post on a different blog, with mostly different topics, and maybe more or less frequently.  Perhaps I'll check in here every now and again.  I feel like I've actually "done it," whatever that means, and my sobriety is now a foundation instead of a shaky bit of dramatic angst, so I don't feel compelled to draw out every last shade to you, or to myself.  I appreciate all previous comments, emails, communications, etc., and I wish everyone the best of luck.

Alcohol Exacerbates Anxiety -

If you have serious anxiety, don't drink. I'm serious. I'm serious without needing to develop this idea too much. I personally experienced hard and relentless panic attacks as a drinker. If you are suffering, as anonymous is, below, then please: eliminate all stimulants from your life (coffee), concentrate on getting rest, try hard to eat enough protein and exercise. 

Sounds simple, I know. Simple, everyday stuff.

 Everyday living. The regular routine things that get us through become quasi-religious.


 Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "What Happens When You Stop Drinking. How Long to ...": I haven't drank in 5 months and I'm still an anxious nervous wreck. Don't know how long a can go on. I need relief. I need a drink

Showing Status Through Alcohol

Not like this needs to be said, anyway. But. Booze is a status marker. And not only that, some people are convinced that collecting expensive booze, and, for instance, showing it off at a party, is a "hot shit" kind of thing to do. And they're mostly right, for a certain crowd. The method for showing it off can vary from understated (like serving blue label and acting like it is no big deal) to over-stated, like, well, forcing the presence of said whiskey on everyone's ears but not tongue. Anyway, ever been at a family get-together that devolves into vicious fighting? It wasn't helped out by the "blue" label.

Music = Perfect Combination of Intelligence and Emotion

I Miss You, IPA -

It is no joke.  Not drinking.  There's less relief now, at over three years, than there was before at three days or weeks or even months.  The relief on night-afters is higher.  Social engagements are less tricky, and most of my friends respect non-drinking, mostly because they know just how much social events revolve around drink.

And there's none of those pesky 3am panic attacks.  At least, not related to drinking.  Except I do maintain the police dream, whereby I'm being chased.  But it has morphed a bit.  Sometimes (often), I am being surrounded by large bears, and they are everywhere, and they will get me, I'm sure, but they don't, since I always wake up first, screaming!  Fuck me, I don't know why I have it, but I do.

Anyway, crowding out bear dreams is the fact that my life is objectively good!

I just want a strong release at times!  And I love frothy IPA.  And my wife, who gave birth 3 months ago, finally decided she's going to have a drink since she was sober for 9 months, and bought this delicious large brown bottle of some esoteric IPA.  And IPA is by far my favorite beer.  Strong, and bitter, and just fucking righteous in a way that nothing else is.  And exercise is not quite the same, or, well, it takes over two hours to get that incredible focus and elan which a quick drink would give.

So anyway, I can't hold my shit, is the basic thing.  I cannot just moderate my drinking.  I cannot drink.  I did not drink.  I will not drink.  I hear you, those of you who comment, telling me that they've been sober for SEVEN years only to think it is okay to drink, and waking up TEN years later, the need to get sober again alive, again present, again visceral and again, life wasted.

I hate the wasted life aspect of drinking.

Fuck me, I hate that wasted life aspect.    My layers of regret and denial and just general shame are sufficiently complex, thick, and idiosyncratically alive, that I a think shame may be just about the strongest of emotions.

The point is not to relive bad times.  I'm not trying to do that.  The point is to find meaning.  Being sober and looking for meaning is a lot harder than being a little bit tipsy--the same kind of tipsy that large brown bottle of beer would provide in oh, about twenty minutes of indulgence.  Meaning rich and frothy and honest, I do believe, and inspiring.  And it hurts to not have that ease of meaning because I'm simply not responsible enough to do so.

And at times it is just not enough to know that I'm fighting the good fight.  Instead I just feel bad for a bit.  Actually, to be honest for a moment.  I feel bad a lot.

Sobriety is the Beginning not the End.

There's a painful awakening process that occurs when you get sober.  It is this: getting sober is not enough.    It is only a condition toward further steps, not itself a "further step."

In other words: get sober.  Good.  Got sober.  Now what?

The journey is long, and although sobriety is part of that journey, other activities, events, people, and beautiful inspiration should fill your life.  You should not try to make friends solely because those friends are sober, or you can always talk about being sober.  It doesn't hurt, mind you.  Naturally, hanging out with folks who get cranked all the time won't help one bit.

But the point is to submerge yourself in a topic or set of topics that allow you to develop something outside of sobriety, or, if you prefer, with sobriety as a foundation.

It isn't easy to do stuff.  I don't know what stuff you like, or what stuff you are good at (those things don't need to be the same at all), but hey, it is worth the effort!  After all, what else is there, if not effort toward higher goals?

Ads for Built-In Vacuums. How Did I Get Here?

If I post about the ads I see, will those ads start to become conscious of themselves?  They seem quite aware and linked to previous posts, so there's got to be a way to make them implode through a nested dissonance, no?

And if all the ads implode, how would I know that I need a built in vacuum cleaner, anyway?

I guess the point is that built-in vacuum cleaners are obligatory, default, and that I'm atypically unconcerned with those things that I should be concerned with, and that my meta-vacuum gambit will work in reverse to make me implode, and when that happens, I'll blog about it as well, and see which adds are "released" into the stream of consumption.

No doubt someone will profit from my breakdown.  Isn't that appropriate?  Or is it morally repugnant?

I can't even remember anymore which one I'm supposed to think> cue ads.

Risk - And Booze.

Yeah, so I've become extremely risk averse.  It is probably debilitating, the extreme way in which I avoid taking risk.  I basically want to limit my exposure to the kinds of things that will lead to huge life-altering abstract and real pain.  I mean, I'm not kidding here.  The problem is that some risk-taking is advantageous, even encouraged, and since I've become so highly conservative, I've lost the flavor of risk.

Minor side thought of the day.

Connection to the Abstract

Our connection with the abstract pretty much forms all manner of internal dynamics we have come to know as our personality.  How much what we know we don't know impacts our internal processes--further, how much we conceive of the "unknown unknowns" as thick and extremely large, or small and insignificant, also plays a very specific role in shaping all of our interactions.

If that seems abstract, bear with me as I lay it out for a moment in two purposefully extreme examples.

1.  Known Parameters and Embedded Comfort.

Folks in this realm don't know what they don't know and they don't care that much that they don't know.  "I'm not a math person," for instance, so such a person simply looks the other way when math comes up, ceding authority to others.  When faced with unknown specialty fields, people in this group can look the other way, like our non-math person, or they can dive in and sort of "pretend" to know a field, which can be useful to some extent and in short bursts, at least until things stop making sense.

Let me back up.

These people are people who are generally comfortable.  They aren't really intimidated by status or by complex thoughts, and they aren't extremely worried about how different cultures might live or how a sense of what is normal might be relative or itinerant.  Their sense of themselves is centered and they speak with relative confidence.  They have comfort because the sense that they are small, or insignificant, or that their conception of the world could be startingly wrong, are all sort of absent notions.


2.  A Sense of Much Larger Abstractness and Paralysis.

Then there are those people with a deep sense of humility because they have a sense of the magnitude of stuff they don't understand.  They won't purport to just "get" things like taxes, or Bayesian theorems, or the incompleteness theorem, because they know that "truly" getting stuff takes years, even lifetimes, or is even impossible.  They get that they can't see the whole picture on anything, even more mundane stuff like politics and policy, and they won't purport to do so.  Only experts can proffer opinions, and being an expert is a serious thing that we should defer to.

------

Obviously, nobody is just one or the other, and both have their attributes and drawbacks.  But my point is that this continuum, of how we view that which we don't know, our relationship to uncertainty, forms/informs much of how we treat everything else.

Can't Get Him Back

I listen to Neil Young.  Bear with me now.

I listen to the familiarity of memory, the companionship of my father.  He died when I was 18 years old.  He didn't die from a freak accident.  Anyway, what's negative is unimportant.  What is important is that I loved him incredibly.  I'm his son, why not.  We had a camaraderie that I can't seem to replace.  I look all over.  I have multiple false father figures.  I have surging deep level sadness come up to swallow me at inopportune moments.

I feel as if I am in a stasis, and all of this is shrouded in a like bullshit therapy session overlay, and that's just what it is.  there is no conclusion.

Because even though I can come close to feeling him when I listen this particularly Neil young--music he wasn't even alive to hear, but which holds the very essence of how he acted--I can never get him back.  Ever.  I can't come to grips with that.  I've never been able to come to grips with it.  I just don't know how you do, you know, actually like replace the loss that is so fucking huge.

Anyway.  I like to cry because it allows me the momentary release and the true real felt emotion that I so rarely actually feel.  I cry rarely. 

"What are you trying to prove.  Trying to get closer but not too close.  Trying to get through.  You're invisible.  Nobody can touch you now.  I can touch you now."

A Nice Thought - Start Tomorrow New. Be Refreshed and Find Purity in Discipline.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense

Meaning To -

I keep meaning to post.  I'm sorry that I haven't been more ebullient, preferring instead to saunter into the corner and find blissful solitude, if only for a bit.

Like many, I'm tired.  I am tired in a good way, but also in the way that not-sleeping brings, a kind of bleary edge-of-the galaxy fatigue that distorts shapes and runs rip-shod over normal interactive types of endeavors.

Anyway, I'll be back.