2025: Chapter Six

June 12th:

Apropos of nothing, really: For three consecutive days this week I did not have a single sip of alcohol. I didn’t go through with my usual routine of getting home from work and showering and putting my clothes on before coming outside and opening up my laptop and having a few beers while I write. I consider it only a minor accomplishment, but it’s something.

The only reason this is worth even the faintest mention is because I can’t be certain the last time that I didn’t have, at the absolute minimum, at least one drink in a given day. If I had to guess it would have been like 2020 — the year, I mean — but in actuality it may have been longer than that. It could have been 2019, or 2018. Around the time I stopped smoking weed on a regular basis.

Further, this particular three-day stretch was the first of its kind that I had neither a sip of alcohol nor consumed any marijuana since the year 2009. That is roughly (depending on the exact month, or date) 16 years straight having been under the influence of something on a day-to-day basis. It’s difficult for me to conceive, and the truth is I never put a morsel of thought into it until I made the conscious decision this week to not drink.

Don’t ask me why I chose this specific time to make such a choice. I think it’s just been, like, overdue. I’ve been so aware for the better part of the last decade witnessing how my mother has suffered from alcoholism, and while never have I put myself at that level it is undeniable that each night (or morning) when I came home from work I looked forward to nothing else other than writing while I had my beers. In my heart I knew I didn’t drink like she (being my mother) drinks. But at a certain point a man wonders if indeed the apple does not fall so far from the tree.

So while it was with trepidation that I made such a choice, I was encouraged that by the end of my first night without drinking I more or less had an extremely normal night. I felt normal, I mean. I didn’t have a difficult time sleeping. I didn’t have a hard time eating. I wasn’t shaking or having any withdrawals of any kind. It was just another night.

And that kind of told me everything I needed to know about myself. It proved true my suspicions that while I do like to drink I don’t have a drinking problem. Then the second day passed, and the third. It was nothing, really. It was so much of nothing that it is now Day Four, and as I write this I must admit that, yes, I am having my usual few beers.

I’m unsure if it’s the weather heating up or some understanding that my wishes with Nohemi will not be coming true, or whatever icky feeling I had on Saturday night that drove me to take three days away from drinking — in a way to prove a point to myself — but I decided again to pick up a book that I read a year ago when I was going through a different sort of existential exercise. It may be my favorite book. It is titled: The Good Earth.

I guess it’s just another of those moments I’ve had where I can feel myself going through some sort of change. I say that in the most general and non-specific way, because I don’t know what is changing or what I necessarily want to change or what the universe is trying to tell me as a means of getting me to change. I just know it’s there. The feeling is.

If I could imagine, though, I would say it is something similar to how I felt a summer ago. It’s the sensation that my immediate world has its tentacles wrapped firmly around me. That there is this girl and that one, and perhaps another, and perhaps another further, and there exists around me all of these people who expect something of me, and family members who depend upon me, and the necessary obligations that everyday life demands of me, such as eating and sleeping, and paying rent, and buying groceries, and so on. That I am so hopelessly entrenched in this reality and there is nothing with which I can do to escape from it.

That is the great irony regarding the why I decided to stop drinking now, of all times. Because it’s not as if I am enduring currently a sort of peacetime, so to say. Much smaller inconveniences never stopped me from altering any of my bad habits.

June 14th:

As I go sift through these changes, silent and/or unintelligible as they may be, what this year boils down to is a simple question: What do I want? What do I want in the near term, what do I want in the longterm — in life — and what plan must I enact to get me from where I am to where I want to go?

I felt my life became put in its proper perspective in December when Niña died. For the first time in my professional, adult life, I captured one of those ever-elusive visions of grandeur that showed me truly what it was I wanted out of my future — to study law, and be an attorney. It was such a motivating call that found its way into my mind that I decided I can do nothing else with my life. It must be that.

But possessing such a goal is only one minor step in the process, of course. For whatever reason Niña’s death still weighs on me like a millstone. Some days are obviously worse than others. I can read my law books, and learn this term and that one, or about this case and that, but if I refuse to change my own fundamental behaviors then of what good is anything I study, or aim to accomplish? If every act I engage in is merely a coping mechanism to make me forget, or temporarily escape, then really I am only prolonging what I trust is already a difficult enough road to navigate.

And why, exactly, did I decide that becoming a lawyer is what I wanted out of life? It’s because I would have wanted Niña to be proud of me. I want to accumulate enough wealth such that I will be able to raise a family and give them the life I envision and retire with dignity and in comfort such that maybe, perhaps, if I am wrong about the afterlife, its existence, I mean, that Niña would some day look upon me with pride. It sounds stupid to write. It goes against my system of beliefs. But maybe sometimes it takes somebody close enough to you who passes away to give you such feelings, and thoughts.

I say that to say this: What of my behavior since Niña’s death would make her feel proud of me? Would she be proud that I am still running around with various women? Would she be proud that I have still gone out gambling and losing money? Would she be proud that I still smoke? Would she be proud that I still drink on a nightly basis? Oh, but I did take a whole three days off.

I have too much respect for my theoretical audience to inquire upon an answer to any of those questions. As the graffiti artist SABER once said in the documentary Infamy, ‘A lot does grow in the dark,’ and it is there I must make my newest arena. For nothing else has worked for me. I can’t in real life continue implementing the Fake It ‘Till You Make It routine. I can’t on my blog (even unwittingly) try to keep speaking things into existence. It has to be done a different way.

That is where we circle the wagons and mention why my three-day break from drinking still holds a certain kind of value. Because it taught me that what is convenient is not necessarily right. That mind-over-matter is a real thing. That this process with which I am undertaking, whatever it is, could very well begin with something as simple as cutting alcohol out of my life. That it could perhaps evolve into tackling my cigarette-smoking habit. And, finally, that if I am neither smoking nor drinking, what, then, could compel me, with sober mind, to wasting money in casinos?

This is a painful thought, quitting all of the things that have become my identity, that make me who I am, whether I like it or not, but it’s the type of pain I have been waiting my entire adult life to overcome. If I was able to withstand Niña’s death, such that I am currently able to say that I Am Still Here, and that I look forward to the future, and that I am dedicated sincerely to seeing these dreams of mine come true, then what is pain, really? Pain cannot be solved by a drink, or a cigarette, or the escapism that gambling not only allows but demands of me. That is not pain. Pain is Niña no longer being here. That is the only true pain I have ever known.

June 16th:

There are many clichés about pendulums swinging. This way and that way. Hither and thither, as I have been wont to say in the past. I think currently I just happen to be on the far end of one of those swings, on either side of this imaginary pendulum, where the self-loathing is even heavier, or more pronounced, than it is usually. I even had to admit it the other night to Sarah. I had to tell her that never have I felt closer to Niña — in the sense that she made the decision not to be here anymore — than I did on Thursday night, and the subsequent Friday thereafter.

From the beginning I always said, with regard to Niña, that I get it. I missed (and still do miss) her dearly, but one can only bang their head so many times against the same proverbial wall before it grows so tiresome that it may convince them that they mustn’t have to anymore. That there is always — always — a way out. I don’t appreciate how I wasn’t consulted, or why I am here now writing about it, or that I am missing out on hugs and text messages and phone calls and TV shows that we would have watched together. But I do get it.

And it wasn’t until very recently that I understood it better than ever. Because how many years have I been writing this same story? How long has it been that I have been singing the same goddamn song? Poor me. Poor Eric. Telling you on Future Bets that I am so much smarter than so many of the things I do. That I drink but I don’t need to drink. That I gamble but I do not need to gamble. Love. Loss. And so on. Is this to be the story that is written about me after I, too, am gone? It is a story, to be sure. It’s also an unacceptable one.

After my couple days of feeling miserable, again I re-arrived at that one very important very special question that all of us at some juncture or another must ask ourselves. To be, or not to be? I have admitted to you before that I possess neither the courage nor the willful know-how to follow through with the act of killing myself. I reckon it’s similar to the knowledge I have that I don’t have it within me to kill somebody else. I won’t even step on the most hideous of cockroaches when they are walking amongst my feet, or swat at the bees or the flies when around my immediate proximity they are annoying me. I don’t want to upset in any way the nature that surrounds me.

But I have thought about it. I do think about it. Sometimes. Removing myself from this portrait of life, such as Nińa did. I probably think about it every day, as a matter of fact. About what it would be like to be dead. Just as it’s difficult to conceive of how the world looked before I arrived here, so too I can’t fathom how it would look without me. Because I’ve been here the whole time, you know? Since March 20th, 1990, I mean. I’ve banged my head against this wall for the duration, and I still talk about it. About myself. And the wall.

There was this episode of The Twilight Zone titled ‘A Penny for Your Thoughts,’ and even though it wasn’t the most memorable nor was it anywhere close to my favorite it did involve a guy who could read minds. And there was a coworker of his, an old man, who worked with him at the bank, and the mindreader guy tried to snitch on him — that’s probably why I don’t like this particular episode very much, because the main character was a snitch — and the old man said (to himself, in his thoughts) he was going to rob the vault, because he knew he could get away with it, but then when the snitch/protagonist ratted out the old man to one of his bosses it turned out that the old man didn’t rob the bank. He didn’t even make an attempt.

And while the protagonist felt he was set up, in a way, by the old man, the old man told him that he thought about robbing the bank every day. Every day of his life he knew he could rob the bank and get away with it. But he never did. He just thought about it.

June 17th:

That’s been my experience, if truth be told. Not about robbing banks. I’ve never robbed a bank. I stole a pack of Nerds once from a local corner store in San Bernardino CA when I was a five year-old and when I brought them home and tried to share them with my older brother my dad spanked the shit out of me and the next morning he made me return them to the local corner store and through tears he made me apologize to the clerk before he paid for them. That’s an aside.

What I mean to say is that I am not a happy man, and I never have been. I mean, I can recall glimpses of my life — a month or two here, a summer there, etc. — when looking back on it I admit I was happy. But happiness is such a fleeting sensation, after all. One cannot be happy in perpetuity, for a moment’s happiness can only therefore lead one to having an even higher threshold for such happiness. Sooner or later it dies off. And as it dies, the slow burn akin to receding down a slope only exacerbates further a new feeling of discontent. It festers, forever onwards, this feeling.

But then in the meantime there are enough moments that offer momentary joy, or happiness if you’d rather call it that, to make you forget that you have been sliding. And it almost like restarts the process all over again. So you are constantly existing in this obscure type of space where temporarily you become happy enough to forget that you aren’t actually happy. Until, of course, the slope grows further precipitous and you feel that whatever progress you made was only in your imagination. That it wasn’t real. That you are here. That here is where you have always been. That here is where you always will be.

I suppose that is why I continue to say that this is a choice. To be here, I mean. To remain in front of this wall. To maintain the head one uses to bang it against such a wall. For so long, and through so painful a consistency, that at times one may wonder if they are the one actively beating it against the wall or if it is the wall itself beating back against them.

Niña made her choice. I make mine every day, as well. She had the balls to take a journey into the great unknown, while I am merely the old man from that episode of The Twilight Zone who only thinks about it.