Then & Now

We can’t see ourselves from outside.

It’s an obvious enough truth, but a fascinating one all the same. Especially for someone who used to drink a lot. Someone, that is, like me. 

Every now and then these days I’ll find myself in a restaurant or – very occasionally – a bar with one of my friends who still drinks. Someone like I used to be. A couple of times I’ve had the chance to watch one of these real drinking friends take their first drink of the day.

It’s a real education.

It was close to a year ago now when my boss, Edward Grinnan, the editor-in-chief of Guideposts Magazine, told me he had a new project in mind for me.

“I’d like you to write a blog for the Sober24 site,” he said.

Back in my using days I would, on occasion, hear reports of people who had given up on drugs and drinking and supposedly gone on to live happy lives.

I didn’t have anything against such people – if, indeed, they actually existed. But I had my doubts about this supposed happiness of theirs. How robust, how real, could it possibly be?

I'm a big fan of the 1968 horror film Night of the Living Dead. Well, actually something more than a fan. Like a lot of people who saw the film at an impressionable age (nine in my case), I didn’t really experience it as a film at all. For me it was a reality.

It still is, too. No matter how many times I see the film – and I’ve seen it quite a bunch of times by now – I never get sick of it. Though the plot is simple enough – a group of people barricade themselves in a lonely farmhouse to escape a horde of cannibalistic zombies – for me the movie has a kind of bottomless quality to it; one that prevents any of its scenes from becoming shop-worn, no matter how often I return to them. 

I love a good party.

My affection for parties goes back – way back. Not, as might be imagined, to high school or thereabouts, but to a time when I was seven or eight, when I discovered a Dr. Seuss Beginner Book by P. D. Eastman called Go, Dog. Go!

“The soul lusts to be wet, and to die.”
– Heracleitus (Translated by Guy Davenport)

Oblivion, obliterate…

What great words! Both go back to the Latin ob-litera – literally, to cover over a letter (with ink, presumably – as we might do today when blacking out a sentence with a marker). Both words are also associated with the idea of being forgotten. To obliterate is to erase from memory.

I myself associate the words first and foremost with – not surprisingly -- drugs and drinking. To get obliterated, to me, means to get so intoxicated by whatever substance one is taking that one is no longer there. Take the right drug and boom! You’re history.

I was never, even back in my earliest, most (comparatively) trouble-free days as a drinker, much of a fan of New Year’s Eve. This was largely because I distrusted the basic polarity the event was built around. On New Year’s Eve, everybody got artificially cheerful. Then, the next day, all that good cheer turned out to be illusory. The sky – at least in New York, where I’ve spent the majority of my adult New Years Days – is inevitably overcast. Nothing’s really new or different at all. As the U2 song so well puts it: “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”