Joie de vivre
I’m not drinking this month and I already think I may kill myself.
I don’t know how the hell I’m going to make it another 30 days and 23 hours.
To be honest, I thought this might happen but I didn’t anticipate how quickly the monster would come upon me. I may not even make it a full 24.
At what point in time did an icy cold one become my jet fuel? My joie de vivre? I have spiraled into two halves: fiending and drinking.
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My woman comes in and she’s yapping. My woman comes in around 3 most days and she’s yapping even as she walks in through the door which is both impressive and disturbing. She’s yapping on the phone, and whoever is on the other end of the line (there may not even be anyone) will quickly be replaced by me. Not because I choose it to be such, but because my predicament in life (and most men’s lives) has brought me here. And now I don’t have anything to sip on, to dull the details. And boy, there’s a lot of details. I like to operate on the surface of most things. There exists only a small amount of topics truly deserving of the deep dive. But tell that to my woman.
I’m selling a lie at work. I’m selling a lie at work, and I’m becoming a pretty damn good salesman. Just like someone can have sex without emotion, some can sell without belief. Clock in, clock out, get a paycheck. Turn your brain off and your heart off and your mouth off. Operate with your hands and legs ONLY. Everything else is just collateral damage. Don’t even look at it. But I look at it because I don’t know how to not, and it haunts me. I’ve tried to not let it be that way, but it is. I’m 30 now and at this point, old habits die hard. So I don’t find resolution at the bottom of my glass, but I do get my resolve there. I get my wind to carry on, until I finally find something that makes me want to wake up in the morning. So without the bottle, I lose that advantage. My boss says, “we’re making people feel beautiful” but with it we are selling them the standard that made them feel ugly in the first place. It’s like the elected officials who voted for Prohibition, just to become become the world’s finest bootleggers. Some kind of sick, cruel catch-22 that feeds off of itself but seems to only really bother me.
I’m snapping at my parents. I’m snapping at my parents because I’m an only child and there is a lot of limelight. The limelight was enjoyable in my younger years, but now it has manifested itself into extra weight. When I was younger, I did not have to share time and attention with siblings. But now, as the pendulum swings and I get older, all of the eyeballs are on me. All of the kvetching, the questions, the details, the conversations, the expectations, the disappointments, the holidays, the compliments. They’re on me. No siblings to split with. That list was absolutely manageable with suds powering my motor. Without them, the bag is heavier and I’m still adjusting to the new weight. Here I am still longing for a sibling, but for different reasons.
Let’s not even talk about the effect this whole charade has had on my writing, however fucking evident it may already be. The prose style I was going for is already out the fucking window, down 9 stories bleeding out with the old lady next door hovering over the body in shock. You probably have already stopped reading, in which case I’m writing to myself, in which case fuck you.
What? It’s just me. I can say what I want.
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I know what you’re thinking. I know. Why not talk about the positives here? This month can’t have been all bad, bro. For every pro, there is a con. Said the con.
And maybe so. When skunkworks asked me to detail my voyage into the deserts of Dry July, I said sure, why not. I’m not getting paid anyways.
It’s been rough but yes, there have been some great things so I guess I’ll talk about them now to pepper in some balance. The reason I didn’t lead with this shit in the first place is because no one wants to hear a happy story. Some may say they do, but they’ve either got a mask on or they’re confused. I certainly don’t want to hear some happy sappy shit. That’s not my raison d’être (somebody owes me five bucks). We’re all here for the fuck up. But all things considered, here is the good shit:
-My liver health has probably improved significantly. I’d like to credit this partially to the milk thistle supplements I’ve been taking, but who really knows. Maybe those supplements are bullshit anyways. How the fuck do really I know?
-I’m in the third or perhaps even second best shape of my life. This is thanks to the two-to-three-a-days I also threw in this month.
-My sleep is not any better but waking up is a bit better. I always wake up with anxiety, but I have the most amount of anxiety when I wake up thinking about how much money I spent the day before, or how much I drank the day before. Quadruple those levels when I have both spent money and drank the day before. I feel like even more of a major fuckup. Since I’ve taken one of those out of the equation, the anxiety is down a notch. That’s good. Although sometimes the anxiety does give me an edge, like a superpower. I’d be like on the fringes of D level Marvel characters. “Anxiety Boy” fighting his arch-nemesis “The Neuroticizer.” Hey, people could relate to shit like that though. OK, anyways, back to the glass half full.
-Maybe this goes hand in hand with number 2 and doesn’t need its own bullet, but I’mway less bloated. My clothes fit a bit better. I’m in that tenuous stage where the waistline is down a bit and the pecs have been worked out properly which make shirts fit a bit better. Most guys reading this know what I’m talking about. This whole bullet is so obvious. I’m just scraping the bottom here for some positivity…
-I’ve reinforced a bit of my resolve and determination. These features have reared their shiny heads on occasion, but still nice to see them. Hell, I didn’t even drink on the major national holiday this month, which in past years I have spent under the heavy spell of substance. People passed me things. I declined. “Homey don’t play that… until the end of the month.”