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.”
This lack of interest in New Year’s is of course common among serious drinkers. What it stems from, I suspect, is a larger distrust of the patterns of drinking that all “ordinary,” non-alcoholic drinkers engage in. “Normal” drinkers use alcohol to artificially elevate their spirits, and know ahead of time that – if they raise them too high – they’ll feel the worse for it next day. But real drinkers – well, at least THIS real drinker – don’t want any part of this kind of situation. I never drank to momentarily feel better – to buoy my spirits for a few brief hours. I drank to save myself from the world – to transform that world, and myself, into different entities than they were before I picked up the bottle. I didn’t drink to be cheered up. I drank to be rescued.
Which is why it was such a Eureka moment for me when I discovered drinking in the morning.
It was back in 1983 or so, and I was still in college. One day, waking up after another night of over-indulgence, I happened to notice an un-opened beer on my bookshelf. “What the hell,” I thought to myself. I cracked it, downed it, and… presto! The world was an okay place again. When I was a kid I was a fan of Johnny Hart’s comic The Wizard of Id. One of the characters in this strip was a medieval wino whose name I forget. In one strip, this drinker proclaims to another character that he has discovered the cure for the hangover. What is it? The other character asks. “Stay drunk,” says the wino.
For some reason, that strip, read originally when I was no more than ten or eleven, always stuck in my memory. That day at college, I learned that it was true.
In the years to come, my morning drinking became ever more sophisticated. I learned that not only did drinking first thing in the morning cure one of whatever pain and nausea (and guilt) one might have woken up with, but that it also – if managed correctly – brought on a mental state entirely superior to that achieved by “ordinary” night-time drunkenness. By the time I was in my late twenties, there was no mental state I prized more than that of being both hung-over AND drunk. There was no artificial boisterousness in this condition, no feeling of being falsely and momentarily elevated. It was a state BEYOND ordinary drunkenness. One in which my mind – my ordinary, ever-preoccupied, ever insecure, ever worried, everyday mind – had been beaten completely into submission, so that another, altogether different me could emerge. In this state I was neither cheerful nor gloomy, happy nor sad. I just… WAS.
Of course, something went wrong eventually. As the years passed, it became harder and harder to maintain the delicate balance necessary to sustain this condition. As my mind and body became ever more ravaged by my intake of alcohol, it became harder and harder to avoid drinking too much too fast in the morning, and becoming simply a drunk, demented, basket case.
Had I been a more disciplined drinker – had I not been such an enthusiastic convert to the wisdom of that Wizard of Id character – I probably could have stretched my drinking years out longer. Drunks who only drink in the evening don’t destroy their minds and bodies as fast as those who insist on hitting the bottle the minute they’re conscious.
But I can’t say I suffer any regret at this. Being an all-the-time drinker allowed me to find out more swiftly than I otherwise might have that not only did I not want what “ordinary” drinkers wanted – a momentary high followed by a momentary low – but that what I really, really wanted was something that alcohol – or other drugs – could never give me, no matter how and when I took them. I didn’t want happiness or unhappiness, good moods or bad. I wanted something larger, and more permanent: A condition that exists beneath these two comparatively superficial states, and in comparison to which they are both equally trivial. A state that those strange, almost mystical states of morning-after drinking I so loved were a kind of unhealthy approximation of.
“There is something within you,” writes the contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, “that remains unaffected by the transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only through surrender do you have access to it. It is your life, your very Being – which exists eternally in the timeless realm of the present. Finding this life is ‘the one thing that is needed.’”
For me, that is a truth which applies on New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and every moment of every other day of the year.