2025: Chapter Seven

June 22nd:

Pursuant to my last post, I am currently on Day Five of my second iteration into complete sobriety. I don’t even know what to call it, really. Sobriety sounds the most powerful so I’ve been using that. Plus it’s, like, true. But I didn’t enter into this quasi-sober cleanse with the intention of never drinking or never smoking weed again. It’s more just the vehicle, sobriety is, to release me from the cycle I have been in.

The absolute truth is that I haven’t missed it. Drinking, that is. It doesn’t compare in any reasonable way to quitting cigarettes, or the hopeless withdrawals that came from stopping cold turkey consuming painkiller medication. And, honestly, in the days I stopped smoking weed (mainly in times I needed to get hired for a new job), even that seemed a habit that was a lot harder to kick. Because in each and all of these items it felt like they were being taken away from me. From my body. That my body needed them to keep going, or to feel normal.

Drinking, on the opposite hand, felt rather like something I did to make everything better. That is the biggest difference. If the three days I took off originally taught me anything it was that I didn’t need alcohol to survive, so this recent (and ongoing) five-day stretch is just a continuation of what has already been proven.

Again, as was mentioned in a previous blog, I imagine the hardest part was getting over the fact that my addictions — or vices — were so much a part of my identity that it never really made sense for me to stop. It became terribly easy for me to fall into the trap of going out (whether with my friends or various women) to places like bars and casinos, because those were/are two environments I am most comfortable in. We drink, we have a good time, and we tip generously all the workers to ensure the best possible experience. And so, like I said: It was just easy.

So that is the hardest part for me… acting counter to this identity I’ve established. I’m not exactly saying I’m like David Duchovny’s character from Californication or anything, but it’s somewhere in that realm. His life is entirely a cliché, but perhaps that is what makes him so relatable. To me, anyway. My own personal escapades aren’t worthy of a television series, but over recent months and years they have certainly provided the overwhelming majority of content on this blog.

And that has more or less always been the pathetic sort of justification, or copout, I have used insofar as why I do so many of the things that I do. Because I’ve needed a reason for why I’ve followed through with these (arguably questionable) life experiences. One of my great fears is that if I don’t do anything interesting then I won’t have anything interesting to say. Or worse: That I won’t be interesting.

June 24th:

It is thus how cutting alcohol out of my life has provided me the energy to spend more of my downtime as I did in my early teenage years. Which is to say: My video game output has gone up, slightly. My condo looks fucking spotless. And this most recent weekend of mine I even decided to sort like 10 years worth of change — quarters, dimes, nickels, half-dollars, gold dollars, etc. — and after I did that I rolled them up in their appropriately designated rolling papers and put them in a box with all the other change I rolled during days of yonder.

In other words: I’m kind of a loser. At least when I put it in those terms. And yet what I feel in my heart most abundantly right now is a sense of extreme fulfillment, by doing such insignificant chores, and mindless activities, of which are currently passing my time. I enjoy going grocery shopping, and doing laundry, and folding clothes. I enjoy sweeping my front porch and back patio, even with the knowledge that the desert winds will bring more sand and dust to be swept.

Especially given that my alternative to the simple lifestyle I just described is going out and drinking and spending money and perhaps going to a casino afterwards and spending money further and driving home under the influence and feeling like shit, having spent so much, and then eventually going to work after my weekend is over to offer a much more interesting story (comparatively), filled with actual happenings, about a weekend that set me back another couple thousand dollars, or whatever, knowing that it’s basically going to take me an entire paycheck to recoup those losses, and then I’ll go through the song and dance with myself about how I won’t be having a night like that again and I’ll be very earnest by making such a declaration, but then a week or two later I’ll go out to see some bitch and I’ll throw money around towards this direction and that one and I’ll find myself in the same predicament, making the same declaration to myself once more. And so on.

This last seven days has doubtless been the most sincere attempt I have ever made to do right by myself. Because that’s who I owe this sobriety to, first and foremost. Of course I was very proud to tell my mother about this plan. I’ve been in the trenches for several months discussing it with Sarah. And with a nod to my last blog, I do keep Niña particularly close to my heart. I want to correct so many of the behaviors that I failed to long before her and I met, and certainly when we were together.

And for what? It has been almost, like, disappointing, in a way, how fucking easily I have managed to stop drinking. I guess I was expecting it to be a worthy challenge, or a competition I would have to engage in with myself. In actuality I spent the last seven or eight years looking forward to this empty sort of nightly ritual — drinking — with the belief that it somehow made my writing better, or more entertaining. Each night I stayed at Niña’s apartment (between 2019-’22) I dedicated like an hour (or more) to going outside to the back patio and having a few beers as my way of making time for myself. Indeed it may have been necessary, but now that I’m here I can think only of it being time wasted from her.

I don’t mean to make everything a referendum regarding Niña, and lamenting the passages of memories that may have better been served with her rather than without. I think that’s just the way brain works. I always believe I can fix everything all the time. That I alone carry with me that kind of power.

June 25th:

Among the many contemplations and reflections I have made over the course of this six-plus-months-long grieving process is simply realizing, or at least making an attempt at realizing, just how little power I truly have. That is perhaps the lesson of most consequence vis-a-vis staying true to this streak of sobriety: Understanding that I can control only what is mine to control. Which is to say — me.

I ordered a book last night on Amazon titled The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation, and I’m really excited to read it. Religion long ago I abandoned, and to be frank I never looked back at it or like reevaluated my position. Even a cursory look at this blog would provide for the reader an obvious answer as to what my belief-system is all about. As such I do not seek for Buddhism to replace things like logic, mathematics, or the scientific method.

Instead I aim to utilize it as a means to deal with my own suffering, for suffering I have been. I tried and for many years I failed at using drugs and alcohol to temporarily replace this feeling of pain and suffering. For a time I imagine I sort of tricked myself into believing I am an adult, and that many adults do such things as I to soften the blow of all the pain and suffering. And that, in a way, made me feel even more like an adult. That the adult thing to do was to drink, or use drugs.

This is opposite-land where now I reside. Where I find the adult thing, or at least the most adult thing I can do, is to reject the sugar-rush type of sensation that drinking and drugs provide. Where what is easy is no longer what I desire. Where I used to pop painkillers to kill the pain. Where I used to drink and gamble as a means of escapism. In opposite-land, my pain and my suffering must be confronted the old-fashion way: through the process of self-discovery.

June 26th:

Another fun fact — this most recent week (starting at the apex of this particular article) is the first time in the history of this blog, which began in 2013, where I haven’t been high and/or drinking while I have been physically writing. My entire process as a writer hitherto has been to get my thoughts out while I’m fucked up and going back the following day with a clear, sober mind, to edit it. That’s real.

Always I have been so passionate about this shit. Writing, I mean. I looked so forward to getting behind my laptop in front of this otherwise blank space, that which must be filled, and so such a rush of endorphins or adrenaline or whatever it is that leads one to feel good about doing something — such as writing does for me — was only heightened by the marijuana or the beers or the alcohol. It made (as I mentioned earlier) a good feeling even better.

What I mean to say is that this is a new frontier for me. Every sports article, every political dissertation, every subtle sentence speaking in hush whispers of the optimism felt from a blossoming love, every harsh reconciliation when such a candle exhausted its flame, and everything in between… all of it has been under the influence. I was in my dorm room in Blacksburg VA writing on Xanga the last time the words were produced with a sober mind.

And within this 12- or 13-year gap since 2013 I have lusted after only that with which has brought me emptiness. I’ve been on the chase for money, and both the attention and affection of various women. I’ve staked my dreams on both. On accruing enough money to own material possessions such as houses and cars. On obtaining my conception of what being ‘successful’ means, in hopes that that will deliver me a woman of equal caliber.

It has made me incredibly competitive throughout my life, chasing such empty dreams. It’s instilled in me a reserved sense of hatred for those I considered less intelligent and/or less sophisticated and/or less worldly than I am but who still were more ‘successful’ than me — whether in terms of money or the ownership of property, and so on. And it’s made me further hate myself for being in a lesser position than they.

June 27th:

I’ve referenced on several occasions that the thinking person knows already the answers to the questions that ail them. That the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and again with the expectation of a differing result. These manner of clichés have on Future Bets become so engrained that they have laid the framework of a developing theme.

I am very proud to say that, while I have not yet arrived at the point of transcendence, I am finally on a path that may well deliver me from all that has ailed me for so many years. I believe I have finally had enough. I have finally tired myself out from all my empty chases, and finally tired from running away from my pains and sufferings. This is as whole as I have felt in a really, really long time.

Again, I have particular difficulty imagining myself going the rest of my lifetime — let alone another month — without ordering a beer and drinking it to my satisfaction. I also doubt at some night out when I am with one of my friends and he (or she) pulls out a weed pen or some form of a joint or blunt that I won’t happily take a drag. These things can and likely will happen again.

But not before I find some peace. That is all I have longed for. I just didn’t know how to do it. If truth be told I didn’t think sobriety was the way; I figured peace would arrive just as every other good thing that has ever happened in my life: By virtue of some random epiphanic realization that sparked within my brain out of absolutely nowhere.

What I will say is that this peace I seek, that I long for, I am in no rush for it to come. I won’t be cutting corners or grasping at the lowest-hanging fruit as a means of convincing myself that I’m fine, that it’s fine, that everything is fine, such that I can continue on with my regularly scheduled drinking program. I can wait on that. I’ll wait for as long as it takes.