2025: Chapter 21

December 19th:

Last night I had four beers. Four Corona’s and four limes, to be exact. I went to Burgers and Beer and although my best friend Spencer told me he in no way wanted to be held responsible, by the time he arrived at circa 7:15 P.M. Pacific Standard Time the die had been cast. Already I was midway through my very first beer in precisely six months and one day.

In quintessential Eric Reining fashion, I had no good reason to stop my sobriety dead in its tracks. I was simply driving home yesterday from San Bernardino CA having already done my biweekly diligence by getting my haircut and seeing my dad afterwards and it was thus, somewhere on the 10-freeway heading east, that I decided tonight is the night. I don’t feel particularly bad or, like, guilty about it, and I also don’t believe — in spite of having now a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts (vis-a-vis drinking) — that anything in my life will fundamentally change now that I had four beers. In other words, I didn’t go out first thing this morning and pick up a 12-pack or anything.

It goes without saying that I have been stressed lately. Even as the clock inches closer to striking midnight on my quite awful 2025 campaign, the last couple months on a day-to-day basis have been the worst of it. I think Wednesday night, lying sleepless in bed, was sort of the crescendo to everything that has been ailing me over the previous several months. I realized that sobriety is not something that can fix me. That in spite of all my progress, I have barely scratched the proverbial surface on what’s been festering deep down inside of me.

And that’s okay. I have spent the bulk of this last year merely holding on and making it into the next day. I have tried to find solutions on my terms, that somehow incorporated my own personal threshold for comfortability, even though my terms and my level of comfort are both directly responsible for why I feel the way I do. Minor tweaks and modifications are important, but they aren’t effective enough to deliver me to where I need to be.

I have clearly lost my fastball. My verve for life has seemingly evaporated on me. I find myself pushing back my meals and doing like a daily kind of fast where I wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and don’t eat until well after I get off work in the wee hours of the morning. On my weekends I’m not getting out of bed until 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening and I’m not eating until after I wake up from a nap in the A.M. hours. All I really want to do is smoke cigarettes and listen to depressing-adjacent music while I write. And sleep.

I don’t have to put a label on what that means exactly, for I’ll leave the business of obvious observations to you — my dear reader. For me this year has been a lot of fixing this problem only to deal with that one, and curtailing that problem only to deal with this one, and so on. I’ve become the cartoon character that plugs one hole on the sinking ship only to have it sprout from three new avenues, and then plugging those three to have it spring from ten other spots, until finally the ship got capsized.

Given my year-long struggle it’s probably ironic that my recent stress is over a girl, but at the same time it’s also pretty predictable. I can go on eating shit over grieving Niña’s death, the omnipresent type of negativity that surrounds my general workplace, the minor and silent intrapersonal issues I’m confronted by even when things in my life are going quote end quote Good, but when love is dropped into the mix it seems to always be the straw which breaks the camel’s back.

I’m just bad at expressing myself when I love somebody. That’s all. I’ve probably had this problem my whole life. I’ve grown so accustomed to not caring, and having everybody bring their vulnerabilities to me, and so it is such a rare thing for me to be on the opposite end of this paradigm. It is so pathetically arrogant for me to believe that whenever it is that I do happen to love somebody the expectation should be that I will get what I want. That I won’t have to deal with these pangs of fear.

I know I’ll snap out of this — because I always do — but then when I am not so devoted and caring and loving I revert back to proving true my reputation of being carless and dispassionate with women. It is Catch-22. Just as Preston Waters said in the kids movie Blank Check: ‘How can I save money if I don’t have any?’ How can I prove my loyalty if I am not given the opportunity to prove my loyalty?

December 22nd:

For the record, I haven’t had anything to drink over the last three days. I really like normalized my routine of not drinking — as opposed to how it always was (pre-sobriety) where my routine was to drink every time I got off work and came home and started writing. Or every time I went out. Or every time I went to the casino. Or just generally whenever I was out in public.

I won’t deny that I did feel some trepidation when my lips initially contacted that cold glass, when my tongue actually felt the wonderful burn and tasted the delicious alcohol for the first time in god knows how long. I wondered if immediately I was going to have the urge to get reckless with the rest of my night. The thoughts entered my brain in several different directions — the permutations of what could happen, or what I wanted to happen — but then a couple hours later I fell asleep and that was that.

Part of it had to do with the long trail of breadcrumbs I’ve been leaving for myself over this last six months. The reduction of my daily withdraw limit at Bank of America from two thousand dollars (USD) down to a paltry five hundred. The inconvenience of having saved all sorts of cash and the idea that, regardless if I went to another bar or ended up at a casino, it would be 100 per cent money out. And with how honest I am, to the people that I have been honest to about my journey in sobriety, I did not want to have to explain that I fell off the wagon completely.

In other words, I limited my so-called fun to only four beers because everything else that could have potentially happened with my night felt like such a drag. It felt even more cliché to put myself further in harm’s way than to do the somewhat boring thing that I ultimately did. Plus, I got to hang out with my friend Spencer and watch the NFL game of the year — as the Seahawks defeated the Rams 38-37 on a walk-off two-point conversion in overtime. All the fun was already there; I didn’t need any more.

And I imagine that was sort of the conclusion that I inevitably drew from a half-year’s worth of sobriety: That I always had just as good of a time drinking my non-alcoholic beers and virgin margaritas as I did getting fucked up and sometimes making a fool of myself. Because it wasn’t about the alcohol, per se. It was about the people I was with and the places I was at. Put it on a Hallmark card already.

I guess I just didn’t really enjoy or like appreciate the pressure I had been putting on myself. To not drink, I mean. I didn’t like to read when the reading was assigned to me during my public education. I didn’t like to run when it was forced on me during P.E. in middle school and high school. I don’t like to do much of anything that is mandatory or expected of me. I need every door to be open, always, such that I am allowed to make my dumb choices if I feel that’s what I want at the time.

December 24th:

For the last decade I have posted an article discussing my year in review, but I’ll be breaking tradition in 2025 because, like, what’s the point? Everything has already been displayed quite honestly in plain black and white for you to read. Niña died. I dealt with that. I lost one of my very best friends over some shit that I found to be entirely avoidable and unnecessary. It was awkward, for a while. And, of course — until very recently, anyway — I became sober for the first time in my adult life.

That is my year in review. Thank you for reading.

Seriously, though, despite typically wishing to throw years such as 2025 into the trash, I’ll actually choose to hold onto it forever. Even if it was for all the wrong reasons, it was special in a one-of-a-kind, never-happened-before, never-can-happen again sort of way. As forgetful as it turned out, somewhere along the way it transmogrified into being unforgettable.

Nevertheless, I can’t possibly begin to describe how excited I am to move forward into 2026. Notwithstanding the symbolic passing of time, from one already-proven dreadful year into another that is full of possibilities, I’m really eager to begin my studies in labor law. Aside from the potential of purchasing my first home, or rekindling my love interest, I want to make my 2026 about labor law. I’m even going to take notes and shit to ensure I am retaining all of the important stuff.

As I quoted in my 2023 year in review, after another particularly difficult exercise in the human condition, it was Robert Frost who said, In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

And so it does. From one poker hand to the next, from exiting a cab and getting into another, from spending a decade and a half experimenting with drugs and alcohol to taking a six month and one day sabbatical from both, to having four beers on a random Thursday night for no good reason, onward is the only direction I have ever been able to go.