On Being Insufferable

I did a dry January this year.  We returned home from Spain on New Year's Eve, after drinking at lunch and dinner, plus aperitivo hour and sometimes after-dinner drinks, every day for 9 days.  That might sound like Monday morning to some people, but I felt simultaneously saturated and desiccated, and completely gross.  

Drynuary (don't try to say that out loud, you will hate yourself) went so well that I’m still not drinking.  As I write this, it's April 6th, and I'm still clinging to the strap aboard the Teetotaler Express like somebody who failed to read the transit map and doesn't know which stop is hers.  I don't even miss drinking most of the time.  After a couple weeks I started to notice how I was feeling so much better...

...than everyone else.  

I really shouldn’t joke about sobriety, though.  Addiction is a legit serious medical issue, and anyone making a journey to recovery deserves tremendous respect, whether they appear to be struggling or thriving.  My own father, may he rot in peace, was a raging alcoholic who, to my knowledge, never tried to get better.  Unless "better" means cultivating a dependence on more expensive, potent forms of alcohol.  I have early childhood memories involving cans of Budweiser, but by the time he died, he was a Johnny Walker or GTFO kind of drinker.  As you might surmise, we never had a great relationship.  Maybe he was jealous... 

...because I was so much better than him.

Kidding.  Not really.  No but I'm joking.  But seriously.

Really, though, it’s been good to recalibrate and take a break from the old Sunday Morning Apology Tour where you try to peel back the curtain on last night’s brownout and figure out what you’ve done and who deserves an apology.  Fortunately, as far as I know, I’ve never done anything truly awful to another person or seriously injured myself, unless you count bursting capillaries in my face from puking so hard.  It's usually my liver, dignity, and wallet that I've violated, in that order.  And it’s not even like I would normally drink that much, or that often.  We're talking weekends only, rarely more than 3-4 drinks over the course of an evening, which was usually fine.  Not great, but not disastrous.  Except, you know, on those magical occasions when just one more or just go ahead and switch from red wine to whiskey sound like valid adult decisions.

I don't think I'm actually an alcoholic, but I do have a drinking problem, which is that I’m just really bad at it.

Drinking for me is like riding a roller coaster that is so shitty and dangerous that the engineers get sued, the amusement park becomes abandoned and haunted, and then R.L. Stine writes a Goosebumps book about it.   The booze coaster starts out with a rapid 30 foot ascent where everyone is waving their arms and having fun, but then the tracks enter a tunnel and plummet 200 feet into total darkness.  There’s a bunch of loops, at some point on the journey you get your picture taken and the results are super unflattering, and then the ride screeches back to the platform.   You unbuckle and stagger away to vomit uncontrollably for the next 18 hours.  When you finally stop puking up bile long enough to sit upright and eat a few saltines, you look at the photos and realize it was unwise to ride a roller coaster in a skirt, plus your purse was unzipped the whole time and now your wallet and keys are missing.  It’s an ordeal.  

All that is bad, and yet my biggest fear when I’m drinking is not that I’ll lose my wallet or binge eat an entire box of fiber cereal, because I’ve definitely done that more than once.  The fiber cereal, not losing my wallet.  If we're being honest here, Trader Joe's Bran Flakes are my binge of choice, drunk or sober.  I like a good clean colon is what I'm saying.  

But I digress.  My biggest drinking fear is that I’ll give in to my siren song.  We all have one, whether you realize it or not.  We all have these troubling impulses we don’t want to share with anyone.  It's that impulse to tiptoe up to the edge of the abyss and see what lies beyond.  It's a good hard stare into the Bucket of Truth, if you will.

Upright Citizens Brigade

Maybe your siren song is a literal edge, like when you lean over the railing of a 10th floor balcony and wonder if the person you push would have time to be mad before they hit the ground.  

Maybe your abyss is metaphorical, like when you’re scooping the litter box and your reptile brain spies those little Ferrero Rochers, those chocolate truffles with the crunchies on the outside, and you ask yourself, what if...no...but WHAAAT IIIIFFFFF?  

And there’s no coming back from that.  Once you give in to your siren song, whatever it is, your life is forever changed.   Some scars may be physical, some are mental, all are permanent.  You might be technically alive, but you’ll never be the same.  You’ll always carry that dirty little secret in your heart of darkness, and the burden will chip away at your soul until one day you’re at the dentist and the hygienist is elbow deep in your mouth with both hands, yet still trying to engage you in conversation, and she’s all, "Gee, I’m scraping a lot of staining from the backs of your teeth, do you drink a lot of coffee?  Red wine?" And you gag on all 10 of her fingers and whatever instrument of death she’s using to make your gums bleed, and you can’t hold it in any longer and you scream, "IT’TH CAT THIT, OKAY, IT’TH CAT THIT!"

And that's why it's important to floss, because it prevents tartar buildup and reduces the likelihood of confessing to deviant behavior while under duress.  

This post is sponsored by the American Dental Association.