If you watch any TV, you’ve probably seen the Staples Office Supply commercials featuring a large red device called an easy button.
In the commercials, various people face seemingly impossible office-related tasks, only to realize at the last minute that the task they thought was going to be so difficult really isn’t after all. All they have to do is hit the Staples Easy Button and everything gets taken care of.
These are popular commercials (who wouldn’t want such a magic button in their life?) but as a former drinker and drug taker I find them especially easy to relate to. For years, there were very few activities I engaged in that didn’t at some point raise the question: “Wouldn’t this be easier if I drank?”
Consider, for example, that bane of all children and teenagers, the Long Boring Social Event. As a child, I’d had to suffer through countless adult dinner parties, playing idly with a piece of bread or a wine cork while the adults around me droned on for hours.
Then, somewhere in my teenage years, I started to indulge in a polite glass of wine or two at these events. Suddenly the centrality of wine and beer at adult dinner parties, so long a mystery, made perfect sense. Drinking allowed one to sit through these things with no pain felt. It could even, at times, make the conversation around one sound interesting.
As they say on the commercials: “That was easy.”
The more familiar with alcohol I got, the more difficult activities I thought to apply it to. One evening when I was a senior in high school, coming home after having some beers with my friends, I remembered a particularly challenging writing assignment I’d been given that week. I enjoyed writing, but it was also hard work. Perhaps, it suddenly occurred to me, writing too became easier while one was intoxicated. I sat down and – with hardly any of the usual fussing and agonizing – wrote the piece out.
The next day, I read over my work and got a pleasant surprise. It was pretty good! In fact, it was a little better than my usual efforts at writing. Who knew? Once again: That was easy.
Not that alcohol or drugs worked as well and reliably as the button on TV does. Many times, in the years that followed, I’d slap the alcohol Easy Button and, to my chagrin, find that whatever task I was tackling had suddenly become harder rather than easier. I slurred my way through dinner parties that I’d intended to coast dreamily through, and would wake up to writing done inebriated that, sadly, read like gibberish.
These days, I often still find myself in situations where I wish there were a real easy button that I could reach out and slap. Long boring social events and long boring writing assignments still present regular and daunting challenges, and there’s no longer any way to coast my way through them painlessly.
Everyone relates to those Easy Button commercials because all of us, I think, wonder at least at times why life can’t be a little – or a lot – easier. Less challenging, less frightening, less boring… You name it. These days, when I find myself wishing I had one of my old drink-or-drug Easy Buttons around to push, I try and remember how it felt back in 1995 or so, just before I entered rehab. In those final days, the big task that required an Easy Button was usually just getting out of bed in the morning. I’d Easy-Buttoned my way so far down the line by that point that there was literally nothing I could do that didn’t require a desperate slap of that button.
And there was nothing easy about that.