2025: Chapter Eight

June 29th:

I talked to my mom on Friday (27 June 2025) and kind of reiterated what my last blog was all about — the idea that to be human means to suffer, and that her and I (until recently, anyway, as it pertains to me) use drinking as our means to ease the suffering. This is obvious and it’s why most people drink. To ease their pain. To quiet the noise. To have some momentary relief. Etc.

Then I told her that I wouldn’t start drinking again until I found some peace. Again, this I clearly established at the end of my last blog, so it’s not news to you. But it was news to her. Then in a cute and sort of innocent way — maybe because she was already drunk by the time I called her or maybe because she didn’t comprehend fully what I meant when I told her I wouldn’t have a drink ‘until I found some peace’ — she asked me if I was at peace with Niña’s death.

I didn’t, like, lambaste my mom for asking such a silly question. But it was clear she didn’t understand the depths of my so-called suffering. It goes well beyond the last six months (since Niña passed away), and I let her know that it has existed inside me pretty much for my entire adult life. And she started crying when I told her that I’ve never been happy, really, though I hated saying such a thing because although I find it true it did in a tacit way come across as an indictment. On her, I mean. Even though it has nothing to do with my mom. She was and is a great mom, and I told her that.

It bears repeating that until Tuesday, June 17th, it had been 16 years — since 2009 — since I went a full day without doing drugs or drinking alcohol (with an extreme amount of crossover between the two). As hard as that is for me to believe, or reconcile, what’s even harder is the fact that I never even thought about it. When I was running out of weed I bought more before I ran out completely; when I was down to one or two night’s worth of beers I bought another 12-pack; when I was down to only a handful of painkillers I re-upped as soon as I could. I never took any chances.

As a consequence, so long as I was holding drugs or not in any danger of running out of beer, I was content. The longer I was in possession of that kind of feel-good security the more absent I became as to why I was using it in the first place. And I’m aware of how dramatic it sounds when I say things like ‘I’ve been chasing’ empty highs, or that ‘I’ve been running away’ from my problems, but what is much less dramatic is recognizing I’d been doing it for so long that I forgot both what I was chasing and/or running from.

In other words, no, this is not a simple six-month downer I’ve been on since Niña died. This is something I have dealt with, unsurprisingly, since I was a 19 year-old. And I’m not like regularly depressed even though depression is something I have encountered numerous times. I don’t consider myself unhappy in the sense that I am not motivated or ambitious or enthusiastic most days when I wake up.

I’m really just arguing that in spite of all the moments over all these years when I felt as if I had turned some kind of a corner, where all of the puzzle pieces were sort of lining up and fitting into place, that I never truly made peace with the original sins of my young adulthood, and that I never gave my life the proper sort of autopsy it deserved and frankly was required for me to move forward in a healthy way.

And I certainly won’t be able to accomplish it fully on here, but I can at least try. I do wish moving past the recent death of a loved one, such as Niña, would be the end of my suffering. Instead, much in the same vein it makes sense that I was 19 having first experienced heartbreak when I started drinking and using drugs with painfully consistent regularity, it should come as no shock at all that Niña’s passing — i.e. the biggest heartbreak I’ve ever experienced — has been the catalyst for why I am choosing sobriety.

June 30th:

The aftermath of my first relationship — or first love, if that better drives home the point — left me shattered. It’s a lesson most people have to learn at some juncture or another, but I was especially unequipped given how easy the first half of my life had gone. In lieu of skipping a grade my parents enrolled me in a school that had a GATE Program when I was, like, 7; and I was generally, by any reasonable metric, one of the top students from K-12 in any class I participated in; every youth sports team (baseball, basketball, soccer) I played on was either the best or second-best in my age group; then I got accepted in Virginia Tech as my reward. Winning was instilled in me early on and often — almost always — like it was my birthright.

My story began out in Blacksburg VA, in 2008, for it was there I encountered for the first time real-life adversity. After a summer spending nearly every day with the girl I loved I suddenly got dropped into a brand new environment where I had to navigate through a long-distance relationship while simultaneously learning that college classes required legitimate attention and work ethic — two things I did not have in my bag.

And it obviously didn’t work out. The natural abilities that fueled my entire experience in public education — from age-5 to age-18 — didn’t matter anymore. I was home sick. I was love sick. The small tears in the fabric of my relationship got further exposed, over time, and I became jealous, insecure, and verbally abusive. By the end of such a relationship I was merely holding on. And then she moved to Texas with her mom and I couldn’t get her back.

It was that summer, in 2009, post-love and post-Virginia-Tech, when I first experimented with weed in hopes of being able to eat and sleep — of which I was deprived of both. And it did the trick. Smoking weed, I mean. At the beginning I just smoked it with my friends, and then over time I had my own pipe and stash so it was pretty much an all-day, every-day affair. This was back in a time when marijuana was still kinda taboo and so I would have to hide it from my parents.

It also coincided with an era in which I was going out nearly every day to this party or that, and it was very regular to drink and smoke weed. Then in July of that year I got my wisdom teeth pulled and was prescribed some Vicodin, so one afternoon (a few months later) when I had neither weed nor anything to drink I opened the little orange bottle with the white cap and popped a couple of those suckers and for the next few years painkillers were, off-and-on, my drug of choice.

And all of this was a response to my first real girlfriend breaking up with me, and the subsequent depression that followed. It began with smoking a little weed at night to allow my body the ability to eat and sleep, but how quickly it transformed into basically taking anything that was put in front of me. Vicodin, Norcos, Tramadol, Morphine (one time), Oxycodone (one time), Percocet, Ecstasy, Cocaine… these were all part of the rotation at some point or another.

I was in a bad place. I generally remember being depressed for about a year-and-a-half after the breakup, but the roots of that depression have been a part of me ever since. Fortunately I grew past all the hard stuff in the early 2010’s decade, and by then my mother considered it a win that I was ‘only’ smoking weed and drinking. For several years that became my rationale as well: I used to do worse, so this is okay.

Between 2009 and 2019 I was what any observer would consider a stoner. I was high all the time at the office job I worked at (2009-2012). I was high for the duration of my experience at dealer school (2013). I smoked on the freeway on my way to work and on my way home from work when I started in the casino industry. The only time I wasn’t smoking was when I needed to get clean to get hired at Spotlight 29 Casino and then later on at Agua Caliente Casino. For those small pockets of time I would drink.

The only reason I quit getting high from morning until night was when I began working the swing shift at Agua around 2018, and because of the hours I was stuck in traffic for 45 minutes at the beginning of every rush hour drive and it was such a fucking bummer to be high while I was in traffic. So I slowly phased weed out of my life. I’d still smoke when I got home, and on my weekends. But it wasn’t the same.

July 1st:

It was then, around 2018, that alcohol became my weapon of choice. I went through phases of drinking Jack and Coke or Jameson but invariably I would get too wasted and revert back to beer, for the latter made me feel more in/under control. Heineken was my beer. It was very standard to keep it to three beers per night after I got home — whether that was around 9:00 P.M. Pacific Standard Time when I worked the day shift or 2:00 A.M. (PST) when I worked the swing hours. Some nights I would drink more, depending on circumstances, but the overwhelming majority of the time it was three and three only.

This daily average of mine overlapped the duration of Niña and I’s relationship. Because she lived out in the desert and I was still in Riverside CA (more than an hour away), our weekly routine was that I would come over after work every Wednesday and stay with her at her apartment on Wednesday and Thursday nights before going home (to Riverside) after work on Friday. And, within that weekly routine, my nightly routine was to go out to her back patio and drink my three beers while I wrote on my laptop.

Her and I broke up in July, 2021, and we, too, had been holding on for many months before that. Late-stage relationships always have a weird vibe. Almost like both sides know it’s coming and nothing ever feels the same as it once did. Regardless, she took the breakup a lot harder than I did. I felt liberated with the naiveté of believing both of us would be better off, while shortly thereafter she made an attempt on her life and it was then I decided there was no way I could carry on without her being in communication with me. It was, objectively, a toxic and selfish way for her to keep me around, but it’s also true that I missed her and still loved her and still wanted her in my life.

Nevertheless, I fell in love with another woman about a year-and-a-half later, and it was one of those that was doomed from the start, but I put all my chips in and made early on the type of emotional investment that would leave me either in the darkest corner of the dumps or in glory. It was a lonely and excruciating time, a pain that was worthy of how much I loved that girl. I couldn’t compare it to anything, save for being that same 19 year-old boy who had such a broken spirit.

It was thus that on my weekends I woke up and started drinking almost immediately. I had four beers starting around noon, or whatever, and then I would eat something and pass out and when I woke up again I would house another four beers at nighttime. And it was never enough to stop the pain. Everyone says time heals all, and I kept drinking for no other reason than to pass that time until I felt better.

Although my practice of waking up and having four beers was short-lived, four beers did indeed become my new post-work standard. That meant every 12-pack of Heineken I bought lasted only three days instead of four, and convenience store prices are generally a poor investment. Such a standard, however — that being four beers — had been commonplace up until exactly fourteen days ago.

Sarah asked me on the phone some month or so ago when it was, the last time I went a night without drinking. It may have been that specific question, or perhaps it was the surprised look on her face when I told her it had been like 7 or 8 years, that made me, myself, consider that what I do without thinking twice about it might not be so normal.

So it’s been my point of view to suggest that my drinking ‘problem’ was not so much about my consumption, as in how much I consumed, but rather the clockwork-like consistency with which I consume. It was a bad habit, in other words. It was something I did. It was not, at least now, in retrospect, something I needed.

July 2nd:

While it is possible for me to downplay the idea that I am an alcoholic, what I can’t argue is how omnipresent drinking was in every aspect of my social life. It was a one-hundred-percent-of-the-time type of crutch for me, whether it involved hanging out with my friends every week or two, or whether it was going on a date with a woman, or if I was going out to dinner or the casino or anywhere else, really. If drinking wasn’t going to be involved, there seemed to me almost zero inducement to be there.

Naturally this attracted me, specifically as it pertained to the women I was seeing, to those who I knew immediately I wanted only for a good time and not a long one. There were no daylight visits to go to a park. Everything revolved around the evening hours at bars or restaurants before becoming entangled in the seemingly inescapable one-thing-leads-to-another dynamic of fledgling interpersonal relationships.

I imagine this is why my failures with Nohemi still plague me, because she was a serious girl. While I wanted the convenience and comfortability of seeing her on my terms, during the hours and at the places I desired, she wanted to remove me from my comforts and do such things as hiking and square dancing, as a couple examples.

This is what I consider the most problematic aspect of my drinking: The idea that it felt like such a daunting task to go on a date, or spend time with a girl I cared about, without having alcohol at my disposal. It’s just an awkward feeling, in those first handful of minutes meeting someone, in the time it takes for the bartender or server to bring that first drink. When it arrives, everything is suddenly good again. My mood improves. I have my security.

For these last two weeks I have removed myself from social settings, but this coming weekend I feel it is incumbent upon me to get out there again as a means to prove to myself that I can do it. I’m actually really looking forward to showing up at the bar and ordering a non-alcoholic beer (or drink), because that’s something I have never done. And I need the practice. I need to see and feel and experience what it’s like to be surrounded by alcohol with the strength and knowledge of being above it.

July 3rd:

Generally speaking, I think throughout life I have been pretty good at identifying my problems. Because how couldn’t I be? They (my issues, that is) have been so blatant and so costly — both financially and internally — that they’ve typically whacked me across the head. Whether it was driving back from a casino directly after a four-figure loss or waking up the following morning with a lingering sort of regret, wishing I hadn’t said this or done that, etc., it has always been right there for me to see.

Where I have failed so consistently is the actual application of undoing, or reversing, such easily correctable problems. It is something (and not nothing) being able to notice and realize that there is, in fact, a problem, rather than simply denying it. But just telling yourself — as I have — that there is a problem, and saying that I will correct that problem, doesn’t mean anything if I am regularly committing the same acts and behaviors.

As harmful as my drinking has been to me, I do appreciate that it has more or less been a victimless problem. As my buddy Jacob told me the other day, after I let him know I had been sober for two full weeks, ‘It’s good that you are doing this on your own, and that you weren’t forced to,’ with the implication of course being that I didn’t kill somebody in a car accident, or that I wasn’t forced to go to rehab, etc. I appreciate that my problems are ‘only’ with alcohol and addiction as opposed to, like, being a shitty person.

Because there are a lot of shitty people out there, and they are so shitty that they don’t even know they are shitty. They deny their problems and blame others for why nothing ever works out or changes. And, as we all know, whenever it’s always someone else’s fault, or whenever everyone else is the crazy one, it’s actually you. You are the problem.

As I digress I think it’s important to note that it’s only been 16 days, and in no way do I mean to sound sanctimonious about any of this. I’ve felt weird the handful of times over the course of this article where I have talked about drinking in the past tense, as if it’s been all that long. What this process is about, for me, isn’t going the rest of my life without touching alcohol. It’s about moving forward in a positive, healthy way, without the need of alcohol.

Where I’m concerned this is only the very first step, which is identifying that, yes, drugs and alcohol and addiction have been a problem for me, and that my destructive practices began when I was 19 years old. They filled the void that needed filling, and they became my habit energy and my routine and my safety and security and comfort. They contributed to my love of gambling. They were like a web that continued, on and on, attracting and catching and trapping the quick highs of women that meant something to me until they suddenly didn’t.

This contributes heavily to why I am currently consulting the Buddha, because I never learned how else to go about life. As sad that sounds. Ever since I became an adult I knew only of the suffering that comes from transient fixes. I’ve been like the cartoon character on a sinking ship who plugs the water gushing through one hole only to realize that it’s created a leak in two other places, and then I plug those two and it shoots out from four more, and so on. I never found the way of repairing my ship.

July 4th:

Just as I figured, it was no problem going out tonight to my favorite local establishment — Burgers and Beer — and ordering a few non-alcoholic Corona’s. It was weird being out at a bar without participating in the way I do normally, but other than that it went as I thought it would. My willpower is strong enough at this point to operate how I want.

When I wake up I’ll head out to Hemet CA to celebrate my mom’s birthday and my grandpa’s, whose birthday was on July 3rd. I assume due to the hours I function that I won’t get there until around 2:00 P.M. PST and that both my mom and grandpa will already be plastered, but that’s all right. I haven’t seen my mother in-person since the Chiefs got dismantled by the fucking Eagles in the Super Bowl back in February, and I haven’t seen my grandpa in over a year, so no matter how long I stay it won’t be nearly long enough for either of them.

As proud as my mother is of me for being sober, and as earnest as she is whenever she breaks down and starts crying, telling me she wants to do the same, I know that right now is not Her Time to do so. She is not ready to live in a world where she cuts her drinking in half — to two or three glasses of wine per day — let alone quitting completely. As such, I need to be mindful tomorrow not to make her feel bad for being her usual drunk self in front of me.

In the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path, much is said about what is called Right Speech and Right Action, among other things, and it is exactly what is looks like it is. In the past I would regularly challenge my mom on her drinking habits, and regardless of whether I was attempting to be delicate and compassionate or intentionally aggressive and confrontational, nothing worked and nothing mattered. Sometimes my mom would say she agreed and wanted to change; other times she would say she needs to drink because she gets really bad anxiety when she doesn’t.

At any rate there will surely be a time tomorrow when my grandpa asks me why I’m not drinking, or why I stopped drinking, and I will do my best to practice the Buddha’s teachings in front of my mom. To get my point across about my personal experience without making it sound like an attack on my mom. It can be difficult hearing my mom slur her words, knowing she won’t remember half the things I say anyway, without that bubbling and boiling heat I feel in my stomach, wishing I could say what needs to be said about her alcoholism.

It is her birthday, though, and I haven’t seen her in so long. I do miss her and I love her very much. I don’t want her to feel bad. I don’t want her to feel as if I am attacking her. I just get frustrated sometimes because there are so few pockets of time I get when she is sober and we can talk person-to-person and I know she’ll retain what I am saying to her. Back when I worked on day shift and was living under her roof in Riverside CA I could get multiple hours in the morning, or after she got off work (while I was on my weekends). Since I moved out to the desert, I could probably count on one hand the opportunities I had where she was sober for more than a half-hour, and at least three of them were shortly after Niña died and I’d wake her up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.

In other words, on top of my need to transform my own life and the readiness I feel to do it now, my mother has always been my motivation. Since I failed to get her on a path to sobriety by using my words — in any shape or form they came out of my mouth — I am now, as a side quest, trying to show her the way through my actions. The further I am able to take this, the more I will be able to prove how possible it is. For her.

And I didn’t have the bad symptoms that come from getting sober. I was neither sad nor angry nor fearful — as was more common during my withdrawals from pills. I didn’t have difficulty eating or sleeping or concentrating. I didn’t crave having a beer (even though I would have preferred one). Etc.

My mom, on the other hand, has much more severe of a drinking problem and her recovery would be much darker and much more difficult. I classified my issue as one that was less about how much I consumed and more about how consistently it was; my mom consumes far more and with far more regularity. On work nights she gets home and fires it up for three or four hours with only a break to eat some dinner. On weekends she waits until 10:00 A.M. PST on the dot and goes more or less for the rest of the day.

It is thus how relatively easy it is for me — in comparison — to stop. Because drinking was part of my homeostasis for like two hours per night, on the high end, and then I’d usually go out once a week to Burgers and Beer. It really was not as hard as I thought to replace drinking and writing to simply writing, and it wasn’t hard for me to stay home and play video games or watch shows in lieu of going to Burgers and Beer. My mom, as was described, would have to change her whole lifestyle. Her post-work routine. Her weekend routine. And that’s a lot more hours to account for than I dealt with.

Alas, this is a one-day-at-a-time kind of affair — both for me, and for my mom — and I will do my best to practice Right Speech and Right Action tomorrow when I see her. I just want her to know that it can be done. That she can do it. That I love her more than anything in the world. And that I’m always here for her.

July 6th:

Now that I’ve established the root causes to my suffering, the patterns of behavior that have defined my post-teenage years and well into my adulthood, and some of the harmful choices I’ve made, I”d like to talk for a bit about closure. As a word it’s very cut-and-dry. The door opens, and the door shuts. It’s a terminus. But I wanted to talk about it because in my experience closure has always been an abstract sort of concept.

What I mean is: I’ve never understood how to get there. How to find closure. My first love moved away to Texas when I was 19 and we broke up shortly thereafter. We still saw one another and communicated semi-regularly for the next few years, and all the while I assumed I could prove to her how much I had changed (even though I didn’t) and parlay that into eventually getting her back (even though I didn’t). But there was never a moment — even years later — when I sat down, and breathed, and made peace. We were in contact for about five years, and then we weren’t.

When I found out my best friend went behind my back and tried to sleep with my mom, I never gave myself the time to process it all. He was there as an integral (if not entirely irreplaceable) part of my life, and then suddenly he was gone and the only face-to-face interactions I had with him were at his older brother’s funeral and one afternoon when I got a haircut.

And, of course, most recently Niña died and didn’t tell me she was leaving. She was a major character in my life for like six years and in a short time she was gone forever. It’s the hardest one for me to grapple with for obvious reasons, but really it just stacks atop every other important person who took up valuable real estate before leaving me in an instant.

This is why I speak so much of the role that drugs and alcohol have played in my life, for they seemed to me always the most reasonable way to cope with all the closure that I’ve lacked. I suppose there wasn’t an easy way for my first love to break up with me while simultaneously making me feel good about it; there was no way for my best friend to betray me in the way he did while making me feel like it was no big deal and we could move beyond it; and there definitely wasn’t a way for Niña to go out how she did while delivering me any sort of closure. I submit to all of these.

I would argue that my problem finding closure is attributed to my level of arrogance, and my one-time belief that these individuals were supposed to be permanent. Not only were they supposed to exist in my life forever, but they were supposed to exist forever in the ideal way I wanted them to. I fear that such a mindset caused me, predictably, to take them all for granted. My best friend was the one I treated the best, and took for granted the least, which is why I assume if making peace or finding closure was a thing, for me, with him I am the closest to finding it.

Nonetheless, in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation, author Thich Nhat Hanh writes:

The first Dharma Seal is impermanence. […] Understanding impermanence can give us confidence, peace and joy. Impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering. Without impermanence, life could not be. Without impermanence, your daughter could not grow up into a beautiful young lady. Without impermanence, oppressive political regimes would never change. We think impermanence makes us suffer. The Buddha gave the example of a dog that was hit by a stone and got angry at the stone. It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, we will take good care of ourselves. When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us. When we practice mindfulness of impermanence, we become fresher and more loving.

I’m sure there are fancy words to describe whatever flavor of attachment issue belongs to me — due to how little closure I have found throughout life — and I imagine it is directly responsible for the various addictions I’ve imbibed in over the last 15 years. Because unlike people, places, and things, the drugs and the alcohol never left me. They were always there to be relied upon, day or night, rain or shine, etc. I never viewed them as the problem that was keeping me from finding closure. They made finding closure unnecessary.

July 7th:

Unironically, closure is something I give basically never when I am on the opposite end of this paradigm. I bitch about it only when I am only the losing side. The truth is, over the last couple years the number of suitors I have befriended and dated and dispatched shortly thereafter has been countless. I mean I’m sure if I actually thought about it I could come up with the number, but the number doesn’t really matter because only Nohemi means/meant anything to me.

While it’s fun to reminisce on old war stories and do one of my favorite things in the world by waxing poetic in the most self-serving of ways, this article is about sobriety so I am going to do my best to keep it there. The fact is, running around like a tomcat is very much in line and goes especially well with drinking and gambling and everything else I enjoy. I’ve lamented on my blog about how maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to draw an emotional investment out of some of these women; I’ve also written about how more often than not I declare that I, myself, was/am not emotionally available. Regardless, even when I thought I was doing the honest and magnanimous thing, it didn’t matter when, in the end, I left them holding the bag.

So there may be some real pot-calling-the-kettle-black fuckery at play here. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t get the closure I wanted from the people I wanted it from, therefore I began on the destructive path of drugs and alcohol and gambling and womanizing, then my aforementioned addictions exacerbated and accelerated all of my own defense mechanisms such that I could avoid being vulnerable, which, in turn, made me deny to women the very same closure that I so dearly desire(d). That has been the lather-rinse-repeat cycle of my adult life.

And right now I don’t think I can have one without the other. I can’t be sober while at the same time continue fucking around with various women whom I know there is no future with. It is true: over this brief 20-day stretch I have yet to be confronted with a scenario where these two worlds collide. I haven’t been presented with a girl I consider can’t-miss, who I wouldn’t want to pass up going out and spending time with. But part of this is by design. I’ve broken off communications with almost everybody and haven’t been looking for any trouble that would conflict with my earnest attempt at sobriety.

That’s probably the lesson as my sobriety relates to women, and closure. It’s not about locking up my dick and throwing away the key. It’s about opting for quality over quantity, and not playing around with the hearts of women who see much more in me than I see in them.

July 8th:

My first (and only) real introduction into the world of sobriety — or ‘alcohol awareness,’ as the court-ordered class was called — came in 2016 on the heels of my first (and only) DUI, which occurred in November, 2015. As much of a drag as the once-per-week, three-months-long class, in fact, was, I did learn one cornerstone principle: That it’s not about the drinking, per se, it is about what leads a person to begin drinking in the first place.

In retrospect that same principle acted as a perfect sort of metaphor for how I ended up in such a class, because the night I got arrested for DUI happened to be the very night my best friend got married and my first love was there, paired with me in the wedding party, along with her fiancé. We played nice and everything, her and I. And I tried to act how I imagined a grownup would in such a situation. But it was an incredibly painful afternoon and evening and weekend for me, being around her.

So I got fucking shitfaced at the reception, and afterwards all the groomsmen went to a strip club back in San Bernardino CA. I was high and drunk and when the cops pulled me over — for having tinted windows, not for driving all crazy — the two buddies I was with had god only knows how much cocaine (even though I don’t think I did any that night) on them. Either way, the literal impetus for why I began doing drugs and drinking at age-19 is the same pain that led me to getting a DUI (that was later reduced to a wet-reckless before it got expunged) when I was 25.

And it’s the reason why I am here, writing this, at age-35. It is to remember why I got started. It is to scrutinize that cornerstone principle that I somehow managed to retain over this last decade. It is to acknowledge that many mistakes have been made, but that ninety-nine percent of them have occurred only after the drugs and the alcohol have been consumed. Not before. Not when my mind has been clear.

While I maintain that my so-called alcoholism wasn’t necessarily an existential threat, it’s undeniable that in my 21 days of sobriety I have felt more free than at any wrinkle in time I can recall. There haven’t been any spontaneous casino trips. There have been zero times I’ve gotten on the road after having more than a few. There haven’t been any instances of looking back at my bank statement having not remembered spending this and that at such and such establishment. I haven’t had any emergency pitstops at the corner store to ensure I’ve secured enough beer for the next day. Life has suddenly become so simple again.

I even feel I am now at the point where if I did have another beer, even innocuously, like one innocent little beer, that it would blanket me with guilt. As in: Why go this far for such a fleeting sensation?