interlude

Finally you simply chose between life and drink. It's gradual, unnatural, so it isn't easy. You do it one day at at time, but eventually when presented with a bottle or life's splendid menu, you actually close the menu and choose the bottle.

In my case, I had a hangover just once, and then drank for 25 years. Staying way out ahead of that hangover. It was a choice against life.

I could easily be in jail for manslaugher or something, for driving drunk. Or in an asylum, for mixing alcohol and pills. Or in a coma.

I could still be drinking, a hermit, waking each morning and groaning at the ceiling fan, remembering that I was cornered, 'backed up against the fence'. Quick inventory of liquor and smokes. Slide out of bed to the computer chair, turn on the news. Day after day after day.

The first sip of warm beer restored me, to be sure, but that was it. Not life. One long, long indistinguishable day, week, month, year after another. You don't wonder that I'm grateful to be sober now. And it's a miracle, because once you are that far gone, you don't have the judgement to re-open life's menu. Or, the menu has changed and there is a very long introductory passage. Remedial instructions are demoralizing.

Only a power greater than yourself can be of any help. For myself, this has never been a matter of will-power. I'm very fortunate that after my initial detoxification, I was put into the middle of the boat, as they say, and set off, without choice. It was months and months before I could have money and freedom and zero compulsion to drink. I'm also fortunate that my sobriety has been relativly uneventful, so far.

My god seems to be a god of learning. My lessons are in order, it seems: I mean often in uncanny ways, they are in order. Maybe I'm engaged in a logical fallacy, thinking so; it would be illogical in the sense that one is hardly able to learn Chapter 2 without knowing Chapter 1 well. But I am speaking of fast events, just in the nik of time lessons which, even when they seem hurtful at first, invariably are liberating and important.

Sorry for no particulars today. This post is like an empty envelope. I've just finished my prayers after a difficult day yesterday, and was thinking about all of this, is all. Thanks for visiting.