Well not quite midnight. But I'm rambling again. I guess I do that sometimes, when I get the rambling itch. Feel free to skim. I can't guarantee a word of it makes even a bit of sense.

            Went to a Living Sober meeting tonight. I never realized how much I skim. I also never realized how much chapter 14 pertains to me. Maybe I didnt read it at all before- maybe Im just seeing it with some fresh insight- but I dont think Ive ever read any literature on alcoholism or substance abuse that better describes me and how my alcoholism became apparent.

            The chapter begins by pointing out that alcoholism has been described as a lonely disease, many alcoholics succumbing to feelings of isolation or feeling that they are different or weird or ostracized. It also talks about people drinking to be accepted and then experiencing even worse feelings of loneliness and isolation after the effects of the booze wears off.

            I was a weird kid and a lonely kid. I had two older sisters at my moms house and two younger brothers at my dads house, but I was the youngest at my house and as it sometimes goes with the youngest kid in the house I was often ditched or tolerated with disdain as a burden and my sisters tended to grind it into me that anything I said was stupid or superfluous and of little value. On top of that, as I grew older mom spent more and more time locked in her room with the television and the telephone and a bottle of wine.

            My eldest sister moved out the day she graduated from high school. As we grew older the middle sister and I tended to form a united front, going to the movies and hanging around with each other when we werent out with our friends. I was fifteen and had just started seriously experimenting with alcohol and drugs when she went away to college. Left in that big empty house with just me and moms closed bedroom door, I started taking off, spending more and more time away from home. With my newfound freedom I also stepped up my alcohol and drug intake. By tenth grade I was living here and there, wherever I could find a place on the floor, playing in a punk band and partying pretty steadily. We shot speed and took acid, snorted crank and smoked lots of weed. Still and all the narcotics were pretty much a luxury for me- alcohol was always my mainstay. I got bored of drugs after a couple years and just declined after that, except for a time here and there when we were out partying and the drugs were just there.

            By 18 I was living with a girlfriend and working construction, and by 22 I was married and sober of my own volition, working running a framing and siding crew for a small construction company. I even quit smoking, which was actually the pretense for me quitting drinking. Right after I quit smoking I couldnt drink a beer without experiencing the most insane craving for cigarettes, so I just cut it all out.

            I was married for 14 years, together with my ex for 17 total since we met. We got divorced when I was 36, having grown up and grown apart. Between the time I was 22 and the day I got divorced I probably drank a case of beer total, no hard liquor and no wine aside from some champagne at our wedding.

            I know I was a teenage alcoholic, gone undiagnosed in part due to collective denial, in part because I was surrounded by alcoholics (this was the eighties in Southern California, after all- and on top of that I was playing in a punk band- drugs and booze were everywhere.) Yet still I must have been a strong willed kid, because I managed to stay sober despite the knowledge- maybe because of it- that booze was a weakness for me.

            I guess when I got divorced at 36 that was just enough. There may have been a bit of PTSD involved (I was in a plane crash in Tahiti in 2000) and maybe it had to do a bit with a broken heart and me wallowing in self-pity. I dont know really, but I think it may just have been inevitable- that I could ignore my demons while I was young, staving them off just on will alone- but sooner or later I was going to weaken and sooner or later Id have to deal with all of it. I began drinking a lot after I got divorced, first tying one on once a week and drinking a few beers each night, maybe a night off once or twice a week. Then it was a couple big nights a week, then three- over the course of a few years I got to where I was just drunk every night, passed out on my couch. Hangovers became the rule rather than the exception. I quit a couple times on my own, and even got into really top shape racing open ocean paddleboards. Id started off in really great shape, kickboxing and racing canoes, running long distance. I was 185 for years and managed to balloon up to nearly 250.

            One thing that I realized tonight after going over the 14^th chapter of Living Sober again is that I began my career as an alcoholic at 15 in part because I was lonely (of course Im one of those alcoholics that was born an alcoholic- of that Im certain, both because of my family history but also because from day one there never was a time when I didnt want to just keep going until it was gone and I was out cold.)

            Another thing I realized a long time ago is that when I got divorced I experienced the first time I was truly alone and independent as an adult (I met my ex-wife when I was 17) and I remember how terribly lonely that was at first. It took me quite a few years to get past that and learn to be alone and happy.

            There are a few other things in that chapter that rang a bell. For one- as a teen I was a fighter. When I was younger I was a vulnerable, sensitive kid, a nice kid- and a little too clever for my own good and too dumb to know how to deal with it. (Needless to say Im getting better in spite of myself, not because of anything clever I know.) I only survived this long because I was an extremely tenacious and strong willed as a young guy. As Ive grown older the dark stuff has come out of hiding and taken advantage of the fact that Ive grown tired of staving it off. I think theres no avoiding it- sooner or later you have to face your demons and deal with them if youre ever going to get any peace.

            When I was a kid I was a pretty nice kid and a little naïve, so I got picked on a lot and I tended to let people make me the butt of their jokes. That happens to nice kids who are naïve, especially if they are looking for someplace to fit in. Around ninth grade my sister went away to college and never came back and I looked around and found myself on my own, alone in a big house with mom locked in her bedroom with the phone and the television and Ernest and Julio Gallo. At some point right around then I decided that I wasnt going to let people pick on me anymore. Through 9^th and tenth grade I fought a bit and lost a lot and went largely misunderstood. Beyond that I fought a lot more and tended to win a lot more and still went largely misunderstood. Somewhere along there I found

punk rock, a place where if people didnt quite understand me they at least didnt judge me so much. That was good enough for me.

All that time back then I really wanted to be myself, but I couldnt. When I was myself people picked on me- mostly the kids who were cool and I guess in hindsight maybe they felt threatened by anything different, but when it came right down to it I just found it a lot less painful to have people hate me because I punched them in the face rather than when they ridiculed me for who I actually was. So the me I would have liked to have been was safely tucked away and the me who was socially accepted (albeit a bit of a thug and a misfit) hung in there, sad but true. I think I could have done a lot more had I just said fuck it and been myself. I dont really know who I would have been. I never gave myself the chance.

            Over the years Ive written so much about it trying to make some sense of it and at this point I have come to realize that some things just dont ever make much sense. But it all makes a little to me today.

 

            Along the same line of thought, if Im not on top of my crap I really tend to think whatever I have to say isnt worth anything at all. I think I can thank my sisters for a lot of that. Years of them telling me how stupid I was every time I opened my mouth made for some interesting adolescent neuropathy. I dont bear a grudge about it. I figure at least Ive recognized it and now I just need to keep that in mind. Just the same- I think when I write I tend to write self-consciously because of it, and I dont speak at AA as often as I could.

 

All in all it was a damned good day today. Im sober and alive and relatively healthy, and I think Ive gotten my mind over a lot of stuff that five years ago really plagued me without me even recognizing it existed. I realize today that my meetings are for me to work on me, and I dont need to worry about what anyone expects of me or what anyone thinks. I work on that. Its really odd, because Im really a very confident guy for the most part, and on the surface I dont think people realize how much it took for me to be that way- how much bullshit I had to overcome and how scary it is sometimes. I usually dont even notice how scary it is anymore, but still speaking at AA is really a hurdle for me, and I rarely do. Like I said, though- Im working on that.

 

Random excerpt from something I wrote a while back that just seems to fit right here:

Im laying on the ground, drunk. Theres an empty whiskey bottle laying not far from my inert position. A pair of high heels appear in front of my face and I roll onto my side and look up, giving her a grin that comes off as more of a grimace.

            She sighs and crosses her arms in front of her lithe figure. Why do you do this to yourself?

            I grin even wider at her and give her a shrug. Me? I find it..cathartic. I bark out a laugh and wince at the immediate pain beneath my temples. Like Gestalt therapy. I roll over on my back and look up at her upside down above me. Again and again I beat the crap out of myself and pretend that it was me that broke my heart.

            She looks down at me a minute longer, considering it. Then she turns on her heel and walks away.

            Apparently Im not getting any smarter.

 

 

And to make up for the idea that none of this made a damned bit of sense yet you might have read the whole thing anyhow- a poem I wrote yesterday while sitting on the beach in front of my work at lunch:

 

Sitting alone on the beach at lunch

The sound of hammers and power tools

And the constant dialog of the job

For the moment a distant memory

Warm sun tempered by a cool breeze

The sound of the ocean and

The wind through the palms

Just me and the birds

And a few small fish

Stuck in the tidepools

Until the tide comes back in

I remember now

What peace is.

I'm hoping to never have the resources to decorate my tree with thirty-day chips.