Three Kinds of Thirsty 10/20/2006
When I was a kid my family often spent a part of the summer on an island off the coast of Maine. At the time there were only a couple of stores on this island, the most interesting of which was an old-fashioned malt shop: the kind with red-leather swivel stools, a long Formica counter, a spring-set screen door, and a wooden floor that creaked in a friendly, familiar way when you walked in.
My parents had an account at this store, and just about every afternoon I’d come in and charge a vanilla milkshake – or, in the high-sounding language the owner of the shop used for it, a frappe.
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In the Dark 10/16/2006
Alcohol was always a plus-and-minus event for me. The good and the bad were tied together right from the start. But for a long time, the gains simply outweighed the losses.
With one exception. There was one aspect of drinking that was as unsettling to me from the early days of my life with alcohol as it was at the end.
Blackouts.
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Planet Me 10/6/2006
“What’s that noise?” I’ll ask my wife.
“What noise?” she’ll ask back, a knowing look on her face, somewhere between bored and irritated.
“Hang on. There it is again. That tapping sound. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t hear that.”
Scenes like this happen all the time in my apartment – and beyond it.
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A Total Waste 9/29/2006
I know a little bit about missed opportunities. To be more specific: alcohol-related missed opportunities. The day I graduated from high school, my family went out to dinner to celebrate. Unfortunately, I was too sick to come along. I’d somehow managed to drink so much at the series of parties building up to the big day that I could barely keep it together for the graduation ceremony, much less dinner afterwards.
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The Thing We Desire in All We Desire 9/22/2006
People – ordinary people – think they know what nostalgia is. Who are they fooling? The only people who really know about nostalgia – who know how to dwell on the past so that it shuts out everything else in the world – are alcoholics.
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Double Vision 9/18/2006
“Things always work out.”
“I’m taken care of.”
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“God’s looking after me.”
For a long time, I was part of a home group that met six days a week. The same people showed up day after day, and I soon noticed that there were a certain number of people who, whenever they shared, always managed to deliver one of the above lines.
On my grouchier days, this would drive me nuts.
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The Dullest Word in the Book 9/14/2006
Back in my twenties, pulling myself together after a particularly catastrophic evening of drinking, I’d occasionally ponder the concept of staying sober for a while. Nothing too unreasonable, mind you, but maybe for a few days, or perhaps (though this was stretching it) even a week.
Whenever I did, one of the biggest hurdles I immediately faced was that word itself: sober. A look in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology reveals the following: “Temperate in food or drink; not drunk or drunken; grave, serious, sedate; subdued in tone; restrained in thought.”
Ugh. Who in their right mind would want a life characterized by a string of adjectives like that?
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The Good Giant 8/29/2006
Ten feet tall and invisible. As in: “It was a bad place for me to be – especially in my condition. But you know how it is. When you’re drunk you feel like you’re ten feet tall and invisible.”
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