2025: Chapter 13

September 1st:

Something about September and the number 13. (Since this is Chapter 13, I mean.) Like I feel that every year the month of September should feature a Friday The 13th. I don’t know why that is. Maybe because September acts as sort of the changing of the calendar’s guard, from summer to fall. From lightness to darkness. From greenery to other colors, before… nothingness.

So I guess it’s appropriate that a couple days ago my friend Sarah did indeed end up getting me a cat and, in concert with the month of September, he is a black cat. I still haven’t named him and I don’t even know if I will — since my cats have never responded to their actual names, anyway — but if I do it’s going to be perfect. The cat’s name, I mean. Either way I’m just going to call him Baby or do my little cat calls whenever I need his attention.

Other than that, I’ve felt kind of nasty lately. After a quite excellent fantasy football draft night one of my very good friends got really liquored up and essentially, in an epic tirade, broke up with me and another of our mutual very good friends. The details aren’t important, but he said he had been holding onto how he was feeling for like six months. Our mutual friend left early on in the tantrum, so it was me all alone who had to deal with the brunt of this particular onslaught.

The irony is, of course, that I made it through the night completely sober. I imagine it would have gone differently, and escalated more than it already did, had I spent the night drinking. I honestly spent the bulk of the conversation listening and looking for a resolution, but I don’t think a resolution is what my friend had in mind. When I saw him at work yesterday, on Saturday, he told me the bridge had been burned. So that was that.

In spite of my general confusion and wishes to avoid confrontation with my friends whenever possible, what I really have a hard time reconciling is why this friend of mine held onto such feelings for the last six months. If we actually were so-called Boys, or really good friends, doing such things as going to baseball games together, and being in the same fantasy football league, and going to his house for Christmas parties every year, etc., why would he not have mentioned his perspective earlier on? Why did he wait until the end of what everyone said was a great night to explode? I don’t know.

I guess it’s not for me to know. He made his decision and, as mentioned, didn’t appear to want me to do any talking en route to problem solving or finding a solution. I’ve had several falling outs regarding friends, but never has it ended in such a (what I would consider) meaningless fashion. Always there has been some dealbreaker. Some betrayal. Some showing of true colors.

Regardless of this general nastiness I’m feeling, what was nice about the stupid ending to the great fantasy football evening was that I didn’t wake up the next day wondering if I said something that I shouldn’t have. I saw everything, and heard it all, clearly. I even went into work on Saturday with the mindset that my friend was just drunk, and that he let the situation get away from him, and that a simple handshake would suffice in lieu of having to reopen the box, in a manner of speaking, and that such a handshake would say everything needed to be said between two men.

So it’s weird, you know? I have found comfort and an added sense of peace by trying not to control everything all the time. And even though I don’t have anything to regret or apologize for with regard to how the clock struck midnight on this particular friendship of mine, it is another reminder of the nature of impermanence.

September 3rd:

Speaking of the Buddha, I took a break roughly sixty per cent through Old Path White Clouds because I began a new book club. The first we’re reading is called Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. It features a lot of smut (because the protagonist [if you want to call him that] is a recovering sex addict), but it’s smut that’s, like, smart. If that makes sense. I mean it can come across as extremely heavy-handed, yet somehow it feels more palatable than the generic flowery romantic-sounding bullshit.

I’ve also been watching The Handmaid’s Tale. Season One was pretty good (like a seven-point-something out of ten) and Season Two has thus far been average, at best. But it’s a show, you know? It’s there. I think I kind of spoiled myself with how much I enjoyed all three seasons of The White Lotus, the first season of The Pitt, and all of The Gilded Age. Last month I wrote like a thousand words on here about the relationship between the capitalist class and the workingclass, and how similar times are present-day to how they were during the real Gilded Age (c. 1880-1900), but then I deleted it. It’d probably be more topical to discuss now — since Labor Day just passed — and yet it also feels like such a bore. Or a drag. Nobody seems to care about any of that shit, anyway.

I ended up getting that oil change last Tuesday, and the $90 (USD) I was quoted turned into about $650. Strangely, that was more than agreeable to me. Such a transaction was so overdue that I considered anything under a thousand dollars an immediate win. New headlights? Do it. New air filters? Good good good. Coolant lining something or other? Yes sir, as long as it’ll all be done to-day and I can pick it up before work.

It’s in moments like those when I get reminded just how unmanly I am about so many things. That’s why I am always chomping at the bit to drive someone somewhere, or front somebody money, or pay the tab at a bar, or play pretend and do hard labor for the city of San Bernardino when I get in trouble with the law, because I have almost zero value to society otherwise. I can’t change my own oil. I haven’t done yard work since I was a little boy. I’m not in my garage turning wrenches on god knows what with Bob fucking Seager playing in the background. I ain’t the person you are going to call when you blow out a tire on the freeway. And so on.

To me it feels almost as if I am cosplaying being a man, or a grownup. Where I have a good credit score and on paper I make all this money that I probably have no business making on nothing more than a high school education. Where I read all these books that look a lot more impressive than they actually are. Where I keep my condo clean and do laundry and shit. And, yeah, occasionally you have to choke a woman while you are putting it down. These are all things that a man with my particular disposition is capable, and wont, to do.

As rewarding as it feels be of actual utility, to accomplish the various tasks that seem more appropriate for the conventional image of a 35 year-old man, I know that, generally, that person is not me, and I am merely acting when those instances arise. It’s a self-awareness issue, I’m afraid. In pursuit of being a virtuous person, and friend, I can’t be anybody other than I already am. I know what I am good at and what I am not so good at. From time to time I may surprise some people, but nobody is ever going to be confused about who I am or what I’m about.

September 9th:

Today marks 12 weeks of sobriety. I guess 12 weeks doesn’t count as much as 90 days — which according to my buddy, who is going on 20 years of sobriety, says it goes 30 days, then 60 days, then 90 days, then six months, then one year. Then it’s just years after that. Those are the benchmarks.

I obviously don’t know the particular ins and outs. Choke is about a recovering sex addict and when the woman with whom I am in book club with asked me about the process of my sobriety, the various steps, I said I didn’t really know. I’m neither on nor in a program, I said. It’s just vibes.

Writing is the closest form of therapy I utilize. I thought I was doing something step-related when I wrote about my past, and what led me to using in the first place. Kids nowadays call it ‘trauma dumping.’ I thought also I was doing something step-related when I wrote about my future, and all of the theoretical benefits I would get to enjoy without having alcohol in my life.

But this was only after the fact. I don’t know what the steps are, so I don’t know if what I’m doing is what I’m supposed to be doing or if I should be doing something else. Vibes. What I do know is that the result after seven days per week multiplied by twelve weeks (12 x 7 = 84) is that I have consumed zero alcoholic beverages and probably like twenty of the non-alcoholic variety.

And I don’t have a craving to drink. I honestly don’t. But this buddy of mine — the one who has been sober for nineteen years and change — he told me if and when I have another drink, that all my so-called demons have been doing pushups. Waiting for me to come back home. That that will be the truest test of my self-control. When I have another drink.

The closest (and only) thing I can relate it to is gambling. Because gambling was always that vice of mine that I never felt had any control over me. I could go several months without playing blackjack or craps — or whatever the fuck else — without even thinking about it. It never felt like one of those things I had to keep myself away from. I wasn’t clocking out of work making any mindful decisions not to go to a casino afterwards.

Yet whenever it was a friend’s birthday, or a couple of my friends wanted to meet up at a casino, inevitably I would have that moment with myself in my car on the drive when I told myself I wouldn’t play. Or that I’d only play a little. Then I would blink and have in front of me a two-hundred dollar double-down on a blackjack table. Then some time would pass and I’d be at an ATM getting charged like $4.50 USD to take a few hundred dollars out. Then some time later that same ATM would tell me that I have already exceeded my daily limit, and so I’d end up at the cage using one of my credit cards to get a cash advance.

I must’ve had these conversations with myself, the one I would have in my car before I got started, a hundred times over the last fifteen years. And I usually ended up in the same place. Losing, that is. When I didn’t lose, whatever cash ended up in my wallet would burn a hole through me in the subsequent days and I’d blow through it at a casino or strip club until it was all gone.

That’s why it took me a long time — even well after my sobriety was underway — to admit that I am an alcoholic. It’s the same reason I never identified having a gambling problem, even though I do. Because in these periods of dullness, of inactivity from drinking and gambling, it doesn’t feel like I have a problem. I don’t miss it. Only when alcohol hits my blood stream, or when cash in put down on a blackjack table, is it possible for me to remember just how addicted I truly am.

September 15/16th:

A few days ago I wrote my mom a letter telling her how much I love her, how she is my best friend, how I think about her every day. Stuff like that. That basically acted as the first paragraph, I mean. The real juice of the four-page-long note was about how desperate my brothers and I have been for her to get sober. I’ve never written anything like that before.

I don’t know why I did it — aside from the block I’ve recently experienced writing on here — and I am highly skeptical how much impact (if any) it will have. It’s just been on my mind over the last couple weeks, the idea that I have tried over the years being stern, and I have tried over the years being gentle. I’ve tried being motivational about how good it would be for her, and I’ve tried being realistic about the harm she’s been doing to her body. I’ve tried almost everything.

The letter itself does not reveal anything particularly newsworthy, save perhaps for the notion that my mother’s alcoholism clearly has, and has had, a negative impact on the relationships she has with both my brothers and myself. I’m sure a part of her knows this to be true, and it affects her. Another, more substantial, part of her uses alcohol to convince herself that the three of us are in some way being unfair towards her or lacking in compassion.

In other words, my mother remains stranded between two minds: The one that tells her she wants to change and needs to change, and the other that is defensive about change for reasons X, Y, and Z. My main frustrations with her alcoholism revolve around how earnest she is about changing without ever taking the crucial first step of trying to change.

The potential power of my letter actually has nothing to do with the words themselves, and is more about being physically there. The letter, I mean. The problem with so many of the conversations (regarding sobriety) between my mother and I is that literally every one of them has occurred while she’s been drinking. Whether I was present, within arm’s reach of her in our old backyard in Riverside CA, or whether we were on the phone since I moved out to the desert, she has been imbibing. I don’t doubt that her intentions were (and are) pure, but by the end of her nights — following such conversations with me — there’s a very good chance she didn’t remember a helluva lot about what the two of us were talking about.

And so every day is sort of like a groundhog day. The words go in one ear and out the other, and so our next conversation will always sort of be as if we are starting over.

Unironically, one of the first things a recovering alcoholic encounters is realizing just how much they are able to remember. How well the brain truly functions when it isn’t busy being inundated by the alcohol carried through the bloodstream. How quickly it is able to fire from one synapse to another. Things of that nature.

It may also be true that such a confrontation — between my mother and her memories — is what for so long has kept her away from giving sobriety a chance. It is undeniable (especially from her perspective) that she has a lot of emotional baggage she has been holding onto. About her divorce from my father. About a subsequent failed relationship afterwards. About being laid off from a job she’d worked at for damn near 30 years. About how one of her sisters married into money, and another got lucky before the housing market crashed, while she (my mom) was not rewarded with such fortune over her many years of labor.

I do have a heart for her perspective. But no amount of empathy or compassion from my end removes the fact that we must remain tethered to reality. Anything short of a time machine, or some magic wand, therefore means our only option is to move forward from this very moment in time. To stay where our feet are. To proceed… onward.

Having a physical copy of this letter is a reminder that my perspective is, has been, and will continue to be unchanged so long as my mother does not accept this challenge and take a leap of faith. Into sobriety, I mean. And I get it, from her end. I know she is afraid. I know she fears what the world is going to look like, how shitty she will feel initially, how all of her life’s routines will be upended. I know the trepidation I, myself, had, even though I am much younger and my problem was less severe. For me sobriety was much more a mental exercise than the physical one; for my mother it is doubtless going to be a more dramatic combination of the two.

With that said: she has been stuck in the never-ending cycle of drinking because she is unhappy, and being unhappy because she drinks, for long enough to understand that nothing has changed and nothing is going to change — so long as she continues on with her behavior. Ergo, if doing what she’s been doing hasn’t worked, and isn’t working, why not try something different?

The final appeal I made, in this letter of all letters, argues that there is not a better time than the present. I know that sounds cliché (because it is), but the cliché of carpe diem isn’t what I was getting at. I’m arguing that she no longer has to stress about moving from Riverside CA to Lake Elsinore CA, which she accomplished in June. She no longer has to worry about being unemployed, as she found a new job roughly a year ago. She no longer has to worry about my younger brother obtaining his driver’s license or finding a job of his own, which he did a few years back. She has a boyfriend now. Life is as good as it has been in a long, long time for her.

I find this is what makes her alcoholism most troubling, the fact that it only seems to be getting worse. Even in spite of how comfortable she ought to feel. Over the last seven years she has had to deal with getting a divorce from my father, losing her mother to dementia before she passed away, getting laid off from a job she had worked at for almost 30 years, all on top of her youngest child being unemployed since he graduated high school and having to worry about his future. Some would argue these are problems that are easily fixed. Knowing my mom, however, it only drove her further into the so-called bottle.

But all of that shit is done now. I’m not of those people who expects everyone else to simply snap their fingers to solve their problems. I am more the guy who says we have been through so much worse, and still we found a way. We always find a way. Such a mindset does not allow me to give up on my mom, even if it does run contrary to the belief that people can’t/won’t/don’t change, or that severe alcoholics aren’t worth the effort.

My mom is my north star. Every ounce of good that runs through my veins, every dream and ambition and aspiration I have ever held dear, is either because of her or for her. Every goal I have attained and every obstacle I’ve overcome is a reminder to her that she did a good job. That she was and is a good mother. That she is (quite literally) the reason I am here, and (quite metaphorically) the reason I want to go so much further.

That’s it, really. She can’t see what I, being on the other side of sobriety, can see, in the same way that I cannot physically (or in any other way) transport myself into her body and go through this struggle on her behalf. She must experience it on her own. She is going to have to deal with the pain on her own. She is going to have to face her fears on her own. It’s the only way.

And, for many days it’s going to suck. Even weeks, perhaps. But the clarity and enlightenment one finds when they reach other side is the ultimate payoff. It’s confidence. It’s strength. It’s knowledge. It’s motivation to make it just one more day. It’s the way one proves to themself that if such a thing is possible, then what else is possible? What else is there to see, and learn?

You can only really get there by being there. The hardest part is and always will be taking the first step.