2025: Chapter Nine

July 11th:

Unlike Chapter Eight, I won’t dedicate the entirety of this article droning on and on about the specifics of what turned me into a user of drugs and alcohol, though I did find it helpful and cathartic in many ways. I mean, it isn’t that uncommon for me to unload a thousand words at the drop of a hat traveling backwards in my timeline. Sometimes you have to look back to see the way ahead… or some other bullshit along those lines.

For the purposes of this post, I really just wanted to perform a simple mathematic equation. Per The Recovery Village Atlanta (emphasis mine): By the end of your first month of sobriety, the benefits of better sleep, improved hydration, spending less and decreased calorie intake will be growing. You will likely have saved over $800 and avoided about 12,000 calories or more, allowing you to lose at least four pounds. By the end of this first month, your recovery will be well underway, and your struggle with alcohol will begin to become more of a distant memory than a recent struggle.

To make the math digestible we will proceed with the standard rates of one 24-pack of Corona Extra (which I happened to replace Heineken with over the last couple months) at $35.99 from the local Circle K, four beers per night, and a once-per-week trip to Burgers and Beer where we’ll say I had another four beers and got some food and including tip we’ll round it, on average, to an even $100. Over a 365-day year the math would look something like this:

One 24-pack ($35.99) divided by 4 beers per night = 6 days worth of beers;

365 days per year divided by needing to buy beer every six days = 60.833 transactions;

60.833 transactions multiplied by $35.99 = $2,189.39;

365 days per year divided by 7 days per week = 52.14 weeks per year;

One trip to Burgers and Beer ($100) per week multiplied by 52.14 weeks per year = $5,214;

$5,214 + $2,189.39 = $7,403.39.

The journalist in me cannot but help admitting that this data is faulty, for multiple reasons. First, every time I went to Burgers and Beer I did not drink while I was at home, so there is some cancelation involved. Secondly, I did not go every week to Burgers and Beer. Some months I only went two or three times instead of a full four — which is regular only during NFL season.

But on the opposite end this data also does not account for the nights I had more than four beers while I was at home, which happened at least a dozen times over the last handful of months depending on whom I was on the phone with in the wee hours of the morning. It likewise does not account for the nights I went to Burgers and Beer and spent more than $100 (depending on whom I was with) and opting, as I’m wont to do, to pick up the whole tab. Regardless, I consider the terminal figure reasonably accurate, given these variables.

Perhaps of even greater relevance or import: Not included anywhere within this set of data are all the nights I ended up at a casino after I began drinking — whether at home or while I was already out at Burgers and Beer (or wherever). Those results are particularly disgusting and happen to dwarf over the $7,000 and change figure that is attributable solely to the purchasing of alcohol. Conservatively speaking, since I can’t recall the last time I won money at a casino without giving it back within the next couple weeks, we’ll say I go to casino every two months and lose $1,500 per visit, which totals $9,000. Again, I don’t know what the exact number is. But it wouldn’t be any lower than that.

No matter which way I slice it — and I honestly didn’t know what the numbers were going to look like until I started on the math — alcohol was (is?) responsible for a cool $15,000-$20,000 per year (paired with gambling) against my bottom line. That’s fucking wild for me to fathom.

I guess that’s part of the objective here, getting beyond the deleterious patterns of behavior that led me to sobriety and beginning to examine some of the benefits moving forward. Obviously if I went a full year without drinking I probably wouldn’t have an extra $20,000 in my pocket, because one must treat themselves from time to time — and I do enjoy buying my fair share of bullshit.

A couple months ago, after my second-to-last casino trip, my friend Sarah — who often acts as my conscience after I’m finished with my escapades — came up with the idea that I start a piggy bank. I think I may have written about this before. Anyway, I’m giving her $200 per week and she has been saving it for me for the last 10 weeks because I don’t trust myself having that much cash on hand.

But Sarah’s going to be moving soon, likely in the next couple of months, and she’ll have to give back my piggy bank that has a bunch of hundred dollar bills sloshing around inside of it. It’ll be my own responsibility, in other words. I won’t have her to hide it from me, and hold it for safe keeping. I’ll miss that. That weekly ritual of ours, I mean. Where I see her at work and hand her off some money.

I suppose, similar to going out to a bar for the first time and ordering non-alcoholic beers, it’ll be another fun challenge for me. It’ll be healthy to be confronted by such a temptation. Especially considering that I just executed all the math on the awful amount of money I have spent on alcohol and gambling, with this the math is actually quite positive. $200 per week for 52 weeks comes out to $10,400. In the absolute tippy-top best-case scenario, adding $10,400 per year (money in) to $15,000-$20,000 (money saved from not drinking/gambling) is also fucking wild. But in a good way.

July 12th:

Aside from the financial angle, I think it’s just, like, cool to know that other possibilities of self-improvement are on the table. After I stopped drinking, I replaced Corona Extra with Gatorade as my beverage of choice while I write. Because Gatorade is really fucking good and I enjoy it very much. But then I went on the Internet and looked up how much sugar is in a bottle of Gatorade, and I learned that it’s basically the same as what is in a can of soda. Which… is not so good.

Then immediately I went on Amazon and started a Subscribe and Save program with a Japanese green tea brand called ITO EN. There’ve been a couple fairly significant stretches over the last five years when I have cut soda out of my diet, and this particular brand of green tea, ITO EN, that is, was my go-to. I still have like a dozen bottles of Gatorade left in my refrigerator, so I’m going to do what I did when I quit drinking alcohol and finish all of them before I start anew by drinking only water and green tea.

This doesn’t matter, really. The leap between drinking to not drinking was dramatically more seismic than that of soda + Gatorade to strictly green tea + water. It’s more of the idea that I’m getting at; it can’t be a bad thing to continue tightening these screws.

All of this is, of course, building to the day that I decide to quit smoking cigarettes. I have never felt nearer to such a reality than I do right now. The knowledge of being able to quit drinking puts literally everything in the realm of doable. If I can quit drinking, who’s to say I can’t stop drinking soda and sugar water? If I can quit drinking soda and sugar water, who’s to say I can’t improve my eating habits? If I can do all those, who’s to say I can’t kick my worst habit of all? And so on.

While I don’t mean to get so ahead of myself — this is a one-day-at-a-time exercise, after all — I’ve always known the direction this path of mine was headed towards. I don’t know if it was pride, or fear, or some combination thereof that was keeping me from it, but I knew eventually that I’d have to change my drinking and smoking habits. For most of my adult life I pawned it off as something I would do when I got married, or had kids. I was just going to keep kicking that can down the fucking road.

In the backdrop of all this, the one thing I have going for me is that I really love to run. Besides working and writing it is virtually the only activity I do with any manner of consistency. But whereas I used to run to give myself peace of mind, and justification, for all of my bad habits, and poor diet, it now has the potential to really propel me past the mere point of break-even — if that makes sense. As an aside, since I quit drinking my resting heart rate has gone from 79 BPM down to 72. Apparently that means something.

July 14th:

Lost in this tunnel vision-like focus I’ve had over the last month, writing almost exclusively about my own personal slice of sober life, I would be remiss not to mention my second reading of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth — which I completed around the end of last month. It’s such a great fucking story, man. On the cover of the book The New York Times writes that: It’s a comment upon the meaning and tragedy of life as it is lived in any age in any quarter of the globe. Please forgive the obvious, but I think such a statement really like captures the novel’s essence.

During my first reading of The Good Earth, which occurred roughly in August of 2024, I identified most ardently with the character Wang Lung. That was easy, given that he acts as the story’s protagonist and his legacy lasts throughout the second and third books (Sons and A House Divided, respectively). He is poor until he is suddenly rich; he marries a slave and then when prosperity finds him he buys a concubine to live in his house; he works hard, and then after luck shines brightly upon him he realizes that opulence brings with it an entirely new set of problems. But he does the best that he can.

My second reading, however, made me feel much stronger for the tragic character of Wang Lung’s wife, O-Lan. She’s the slave that he marries originally, in the first act, but she never gets to enjoy the fruits of her husband’s prosperity. While Wang Lung’s life remains more or less a roller coaster throughout, she is the steady hand. She bears him sons. She cooks and cleans and even works with her husband on the land. When hard times befall the family, and they are forced to move South for the winter to find food, and work, O-Lan smothers her own newborn child, knowing that an extra mouth to feed would hurt the rest of the family’s chances of survival.

Most tragic of all was when Wang Lung takes the pearls that belong to O-Lan and uses them as a gift to induce the concubine he buys — named Lotus Flower — to live with him. These pearls, which are stolen by O-Lan during a revolution when the family is in the South, along with a bounty of jewels, are partly how Wang Lung obtains his riches. While Wang Lung uses the jewels to buy more land, the pearls are the only thing O-Lan begs him to keep for herself. They are the closest symbol to feeling rich O-Lan ever knows, and Wang Lung snatches them away from her to give to his second wife, Lotus Flower.

Even her death, O-Lan’s, is tragic, given that she had been complaining for years about a pain in her stomach. But Wang Lung is too busy lusting after Lotus Flower to notice or care until, of course, it’s too late. After she is gone Wang Lung’s life becomes further embattled in turmoil, and he is never the same.

I spent my last article, Chapter Eight, running through the general cause-and-effect of the last 15 years of my life. As each character either mentioned or referenced within it still carries some distinct relevance, perhaps because she is the freshest wound it remains Niña whom everything comes back to. She is a twofold tragedy, for me, for not only is she my most recent hardship but she’s also the only character who is no longer alive.

So it made me particularly emotional reading The Good Earth this time around, and I imagine the reason I paid so much closer attention to the character of O-Lan is because of Niña. When I read it last summer I was incredibly self-absorbed — or at least more than usual — and it came across much more like a self-help kind of book since I identified as strongly to Wang Lung as I did. But, you know, I guess I do still identify with the guy. After all, it wasn’t until after O-Lan passed away that Wang Lung gave her the credit she deserved.

It’s the most difficult experience I’ve had to deal with, Niña being gone. I lament how I can’t give her any flowers for being my motivation into sobriety. I can’t let her know how much I love her and all that she means to me. I can’t celebrate our big scores working at the casino. I can’t encourage her evermore into pursuing her dreams in other avenues of the labor force that are better suited to her abilities. I can’t just pick up my phone and ask her how the hell she’s been doing. I can’t tell her that I’m doing this, trying to live clean, because I thought it might make her proud of me.

I don’t believe in any afterlife, but I do appreciate what the Buddhist philosophy said about a group of students who were saddened by their moribund professor. They asked him how they could possibly finish their learning without him, this teacher they loved. The professor consoled his group of students, saying that even after he dies he will live on through the birds, and the trees, and the water, and the rain, and the sky. That he would always be there.

And so, Niña does.

July 15th:

Today, Tuesday, marks the official four-week mark of my sobriety. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean — other than exactly what it is — but I do love how uncomplicated life is currently. As easy as it would be to make plans with people, or pick up my phone on a random weekend day of mine to get involved in something, I’m encouraged that I don’t feel as if I am missing out on anything.

Like I said, it’s only been a month. The real fruits of this process (that I went into detail about to open this article) won’t manifest until (and unless) I stack these months on top of each other. One by one. I won’t lie, going into it I believed lasting a month would be a solid building block for the future — to let me know I was capable. It wasn’t until I dived in fully and truly embraced the day-by-day process that I found out sobriety could be more of a lifestyle choice than a temporary experiment.

And I’ll keep being honest: I remain uncertain exactly how far I want to take it. The bulk of my reflections (vis-a-vis how drugs and alcohol have impacted my life) revolved around pain and suffering, and perhaps some mystical search for peace, but by now I feel my biggest motivation is simply the potential guilt I would feel if I got back off the so-called wagon. I know that 28 days is something (and not nothing), but I also know that even a single beer or drink would spoil everything for me. It would feel like starting over.

July 18th:

I talked to my mom on Thursday (17 July 2025) and it was the best talk her and I have had in a good while. I sometimes feel pangs of guilt when I reread certain sections of certain blogs of mine, because it seems whenever I make mention of my mother I talk about one thing and one thing only. It comes across overwhelmingly negative, her drinking, even though my intention is only to speak my so-called truth.

But if you’ll indulge me, please don’t ever forget that my mom is my best friend and the person I am closer to than literally anyone else in the world. Her most significant personal problem is her battle with alcoholism, and that is on her to figure out. Her biggest problem as it relates to me, her middle son, however, is directly proportional to how close we are and how much I love her. Which is to say: My expectations for her are so much higher than they are for any other.

I have spent the majority of my life getting into it and/or fighting with authority figures — teachers, baseball coaches, bosses at work, et. al — on the other side of this dynamic I currently share in with my mother. Where they either saw something in me, or expected more out of me, and I drove a lot of them crazy because I typically refused to be the ideal pupil they envisioned of me. I got a sick sort of pleasure, especially in my youth, pulling the strings and pushing the buttons that delivered maximum frustration out of these individuals.

Don’t ask which Freudian psychology technique I was unwittingly administering, but I found the teachers and coaches and bosses I most got into it with (in a manner of speaking) were the ones I wound up, in the end, being closest to. Such is also true with my mom. I was the son she went the hardest on, I was the son who, in turn, gave her the hardest time, and yet currently I am also the son whom she is closest to and with which she has the cleanest and most open line of communication.

It is thus how I feel as if I have no choice but to continue pushing her onto her own path of sobriety. My brothers do their parts as well, I’m sure, but they are somewhat hamstrung given that their lines of communication with my mom aren’t so advanced as ours — hers and mine — on top of the fact that neither of them have any experience dealing with addiction and/or alcoholism. So there’s a limit.

Towards the end of the conversation my mom and I had we were sort of reminiscing on my brothers getting casino jobs, and she (as my mom is wont to do) said ‘Thanks to you.’ And it is true — that my brothers are doing what they are doing because I guided them in that direction. But then I gave my mom the credit she is due. I told her that Life Is A Team Game.

And the older I get the more convinced I am that such a statement is true. I didn’t make it up; I believe I heard it first on NFL Films’ series A Football Life. Being the particularly selfish creature that I am, it has only been over the last couple years that I’ve actually grown a tiny bit comfortable admitting that I need help. Admitting that I, too, am allowed to show vulnerability. Admitting that everything I am and everything I have ever accomplished was not simply due to being god’s gift, and being blessed with natural abilities, but rather that I was born into a good family, and had good coaches and teachers and bosses — authority figures — who helped me along the way.

So it is incumbent on me to pay it forward. To my mom with her drinking problem, to my dad with his loneliness, to my brothers on whatever endeavors they get involved with, to my future wife and future children, and so on. Always I have been all about what is best for me, but also always (for whatever reason) I have been at my absolute best in team settings. As former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski once said about his star player, Christian Laettner: ‘He’s like a landlord who can either use his fire to heat the building, or burn it down.’

July 20th:

A few days ago I finished reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation, and if I could sum it up using just one word it would be… breathe. There is much to be said about being kind to others, as well as the earth, and the birds and the fish, etc., but I think what is true about Buddhism is universal to religious types and non-religious types alike. That is: treat others how you want to be treated. And breathe.

If you told me at any point in my life I would consult the Buddha, or that I would involve myself in this new book, titled The Presence Process (by Michael Brown), I’d tell you that you’re fucking nuts. I’m only a handful of pages into The Presence Process but it’s another one of those — similar to The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching — that throws around words like ‘mindfulness’ and phrases such as the importance of ‘being present,’ and it’s as far out of my wheelhouse as I can fathom. Yet here I am.

It’s probably my fault. I showed real enthusiasm when recently I told one of my coworkers that I was reading about the Buddha, and so the next day he was excited to give me The Presence Process and I guess I’d kinda feel like a dick if I didn’t follow through with it. Even though it does come across as a bunch of woo-woo, and I could probably read 50 pages or so and get the gist of it and return the book saying it was ‘good,’ or whatever, another part of me truly believes I am just at that point in my life. Not to give woo-woo a chance, necessarily, but at least to hear it out.

After all, I’ve had the last ten-to-fifteen years to read about utterly the driest, dullest shit imaginable. At least what other people would consider boring and drab. But that is and always has been the reading material that gets me off. Labor politics? Give me that. The galaxy-brain strategical nuance billionaires implement to get workers to vote against their own economic interests? Yum yum yum. The Russian Revolution? Please yes.

Honestly, there isn’t a pretty way for me to describe to others the books I like to read. They’re depressing. They’re real. They’re depressing because they’re so real. And I am nothing if not a sponge who wants only to absorb the depressing reality of how we, collectively, got here, because that influences the belief system that shapes how I see the world.

When I stopped drinking I put an indefinite pause on reading law books, because I felt it was more important to get a grip on myself. To let go of the boy I have been, and all the pain and suffering I’ve been holding onto so desperately for most of my adult life. There is always time to look back on the past, all the right and all the wrong that transpired, just as there is always time to dream on the future. What I don’t put any time into — until very recently — is appreciating where I happen to be right now. Wherever right now is.