There are 284 days remaining in the 2026 calendar year. I did the math last night, given there being 9 additional in March, 30 in April, 31 in May, and so on. I did the math because the number in my refrigerator — in terms of there being only four beers — was much simpler. It’s an important number since that is precisely the amount of beers I generally consume on a normal night. And so that is what I did: I had my last four beers.
I’m aware that I have developed a certain reputation regarding my sobriety as being the boy who cried wolf, but when I entered into this loose-ish sort of agreement with myself a couple months ago I had my sights set on directly after my birthday (March 20th). It made the most sense. I had a mini-vacation in Arizona at the beginning of March, and I knew I would have some drinks. I had my mom coming out to visit me on my actual birthday date, and I knew I would have some drinks then, too (given that I couldn’t picture spending a day with my alcoholic mother with the patience of not being a little buzzed myself).
Yes, I did take a two-week detour at the beginning of February — because I had a particularly bad episode after drinking and smoking some weed. I made declarations on here that I knew in my heart I wouldn’t be able to fulfill, and so when the first ounce of turmoil emerged in my personal life I used it as an excuse to hop back off the wagon, knowing that Arizona was just over the horizon and shortly thereafter my birthday would arrive.
Regardless, now that we’re here I did not want to wait until the beginning of April as a new start date. I did not want to prolong my sobriety any further than I felt I had to, because another week (or nine days) worth of drinking means only that I’d have another week (or nine days) to make new plans for the beginning of April, thus allowing me the opportunity to generate even more excuses, and continue pushing back the date, which would only lead to more excuses and an even later date to start. You get the picture. You understand the cycle I go through.
And while I am not super like thrilled to bore you (as I did a year ago) with my most recent sober enlightenments, or realizations, I know that has to be the tradeoff I must make on my blog. Drinking is my superpower while I write. It unlocks different thoughts and ideas that I otherwise wouldn’t find or come to and I run with them and try to turn them into something the audience finds interesting. Without alcohol, I spend a helluva lot more time talking only about the fact that I’m not drinking anymore.
This iteration of sobriety isn’t the same as the last. During 2025, from the middle of June through the middle of December, I really needed to confront the reality of Niña no longer being here. She was the most, and really only, important aspect of my life that I felt I had to not necessarily get over — but get through. I found out that my issues were much deeper than her. That I’d been fighting, and struggling, since I was 19. The proof was in the pudding: Up until June 17th, 2025, I had gone 16 full years without a single day that I did not consume either alcohol or drugs (or both).
Because Niña was the most important thing in my world in 2025, I made her the reason I stopped. She became the impetus for my sobriety, and so over time I convinced myself that I found peace with her death, and every day it became easier for the voice in the back of my head to tell me everything was all right. That I could simply have a beer, or a couple beers, or my usual four. It was fairly predictable from the moment I began drinking again (on December 18th) that I would fall into the same traps that acted for many years as my identity.
This time, the universe of sobriety feels a lot bigger. Whereas last year Niña was my One Big Thing, this year there is not anything specific to hang my reasoning on. It’s more to do with the fact that I know it’s the right thing to do. Already, painstakingly, I have laid out every individual reason as to why sobriety makes so much sense to me — financially, health-wise, and it being obviously most responsible — and already I have proven it can be done.
Since yesterday (March 22nd as of the moment I write this), I have symbolically began taking steps of righting the so-called ship. I went running for the first time in over a month, and tonight I did the same. I paid off like $2,000 worth of credit card debt that I have been putting off for the last couple months. I killed off a 12-pack of Pepsi a few days ago and decided, pursuant to getting clean from alcohol, that I would quit drinking soda again. I also ordered a bunch of shit from a company called Pressed Juicery, because having only water and green tea in my fridge can get a little stale.
That is neither here nor there, as they say. It’s more of a global statement about my intentions. Just as I always argued that, for me, sobriety was less about the actual drinking and everything else that came with it, I feel the routines I have to cultivate which later on become a lifestyle have to be an all-encompassing sort of deal. In other words, I can’t just give up drinking while simultaneously sleeping on necessary obligations such as paying off credit card debt and imbibing on soda and replacing one vice with others.
Admittedly, it was dumb that I ever started drinking again in the first place. It did come about in classic Eric fashion — that I simply felt like it in lieu of having some catastrophe occur which gave me no other option but the sweet relief of alcohol — and it was also very much Me to pawn it off as no big deal. That I was okay, and that I would be fine, dipping my toes in both the sober and non-sober worlds.
Naturally I found out that I do not possess such an on/off switch. I started drinking again, and I started gambling again, and I started losing a shitload of money again, and I started finding reasons to go to sports bars and dive bars and random how-the-fuck-did-we-end-up-here establishments, and it impacted deleteriously both my bottom line and peace of mind — though the two generally go hand-in-hand.
I suppose this is why I never had the proper foresight to get sober any sooner than 2025. Because so long as I am drinking I can never really see beyond the following day. Every morning I woke up was just a race to shower and get dressed and get through work and come home to remove the cat piss and poop from Mr. Black’s litter box and throw that away while I recycled the recyclables only to get back to my patio and crack open my first of four Corona’s. Then I’d eat. Then I’d go to sleep. Then I would wake up again.
Anyone who has ever gambled any amount of money on a blackjack table knows how difficult it can be to get Up, as in winning, but they also know how goddam easy it is for their stack of chips to go Down. It feels like scaling a mountain to get up a few hundred dollars, yet in almost no time at all — a hand here, a double down there — you are all of a sudden losing.
In a way that was how sobriety played out for me. It was an extremely slow windup, almost like I wasn’t even realizing the progress I had been making while I was making it, and then one day I planted this idea in my mind that I was better, that I had made all the progress I needed to make, and it wasn’t long after that I found any excuse whatsoever to test how much progress I’d actually made.
Regardless, this is a new day. Just as I can’t bring Niña back, and I can’t go back to December 18th, 2025 to not drink instead of drinking, it’s pointless to lament or cry about any of this. My thoughts here are simply statements of fact. My original sobriety was meant only as an experiment which I was unsure whether it would last a week or a month or a couple months — and ended up being six — and I kind of choose to view my last few months of non-sobriety as a different sort of experiment. The returns since December have been evident. So now we move on.
The most objectively discouraging aspect of sobriety a year ago was my understanding that the further I made it, in terms of days, or time, the longer I needed to go to find true liberation. My initial impression was that sobriety had specific start and end points. The starting point was the pain that had been consuming me stemming from Niña’s death, and the theoretical end point was supposed to be the peace I found. In my head it was a movie that began and inevitably finished with a happy ending.
My learning curve happened to be a steep one — doubtless because I had never before attempted something so ambitious — and what I learned was that sobriety had no start and end; nor was it a movie to get through. It was instead the opening of a door which led only to more openings, and more doors, and every new set of doors had another even greater collection of avenues to navigate through. The more I learned about myself, the more I knew how much work still needed to be done.
In spite of my pride and knowledge that I was doing the so-called right thing for myself, it became exhausting and sort of overwhelming to confront the reality of how far I still had to go. So I gave up. I closed all the doors that I had opened, and chose to go back to the one place that always brought me comfort.
Once I made it back, if you will forgive the obvious, I began doing all the stupid bullshit that made me entertain the idea of sobriety in the first place. I always knew sobriety was the only way for me, and yet I spent the money and played the same games with my mind and made excuses for why I couldn’t be sober now, like right now, due to this, that, and the third.
I still don’t believe enough time has passed for me not to care, and grieve in my own way, about Niña, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put in the effort to shore up so many other intrapersonal issues of mine. Over the last handful of years, and generally, to this day, I carry a lot of extra weight on my shoulders that I shouldn’t have to. I do still try to control as many aspects of my surroundings as I can, from family to work to relationships — knowing how much of a losing battle it is. I hold on so dearly to things even though I don’t have any business doing so.
And it’s only been a few days. I have a long fucking way to go. I feel like I am up for the challenge, though, because what everything comes back to is the fact that I have lived just one way for almost the entirety of my adult life and it continues to bring me back to the same places. By default, the sober alternative has to be better. It has proven to be better. I just need to give it more of a chance.
Future Bets 
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