#217

Writing this wearing my leather jacket at my desk, a first. Noticed yesterday that writing about drinking erodes my self-esteem, which is still better than the gritty cheer with which I talk about it aloud (when I have to or am compelled to) in order to try and mask my deep shame.

Second post in a row the first paragraph ends with the word "shame"! It is possible that my self-esteem is just plain low right now and that is why I want to drink, and am talking about drinking. It is possible that my drinking is rooted in low self-esteem.

Alcohol--when false bravado just doesn't cut it anymore! HaHA!

It is also because I believe in confession.

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Hmm. As soon as I wrote that last sentence, I took my jacket off. 

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There are three drinking acts of which I am particularly ashamed--four, really, but the fourth is for another day, and something for which I repaid society, according to its appointed juridical extractors. 

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One is driving home from a certain friend's house so plastered I don't remember doing it. Letting me do this quite unhindered is only one of the many ways this person was not the best friend in the world to me. The friend is completely beside the actual point, of course; it's dangerous to try to stop me from doing whatever I want to do and I'm glad they did no more than ask if I was sure I wanted to do that. I try, but like anyone who really drinks, I'm maybe not such a nice guy, maybe not put together a hundred percent right no matter what kind things I say and beautiful things I try and keep faith in. 

This was after my relapse--a fun, sad story--and one thing I had always carried an alcoholic's brand of pride over--yes, a boast I proudly made, while I drank and after I "quit"--that one thing I had never done in my drinking days, which spanned years and years, was get behind the wheel of a car. Well, I did, that night. Nice, right? Classy shit.

"I may be a fuckup, but I'm not that selfish/fucked up/retarded/insane/irresponsible," I said, any number of times. 

Good lesson about myself. Much like the next story, which funnily enough, happened not long after! 

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My relapse didn't last a full year in its dangerous stages, I started out okay and drank like a normal person at the end for a period of eight months--a mirror to the eight months I drank hard in secret and with friends (as well as ostensible friends which are, to degrees varying from the subtle to the screamingly obvious, not true friends and only drinking relations) while pretending to drink like a normal person in front of family and my partner and housemates and God and everybody.

That's another way the relapse was worse than the drinking years. The first time around I drank angrily and openly, it was frankly incredible that my parents never really caught on when I was living at home (barring a few isolated incidents, which terrible though they were did not hinder me) and they were close to giving up on me once I was on my own. I wouldn't call for weeks, never had anything to say for myself. I'd picked up my mom at the airport once with a gin hangover, the raw reek of it seeping out my pores. She said she could smell me sweating gin, and I told her that this was logical, given the quantity of it I had drunk the night before. That left the conversation where it was, but I did switch to whiskey for keeps right after. Mellower cloud. 

Not great. But far, far worse was this sneaking around my ex-fiancée, drinking again instead of confronting our failed relationship. To my credit, instead of dying, or worse, living with her a long long time, I did end things (a little while after we mutually decided to break our engagement, a long and excruciating story), and after a few more weeks of heavy drinking, I leveled out, then pretty much stopped. The narcissist and I shared a few drinks, and awhile after I got out of that, I had a drink or two with my friend that let me drive drunk, who is also an alcoholic and inextricable from my relapse.

Sometimes you meet someone, look into their eyes, and know that you're going to hold hands as you go into a dark place together. You're not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but you know as sure as you know you're gonna draw breath for a certain amount of time and then stop, that it is gonna fucking happen. It's like that, with that friend. I don't have them in my life anymore, part of me hates them for the way they treated me and for how things went, which is a long and complicated story--and it comes to me now, dear reader, that the purpose of this stupid and factually pointless endeavor, this idiotic blog, is simply to collate all my long and complicated stories into a shape that I can try to see and understand before I shuffle off. 

Anyway, people like that often drink together until one or both of them die. That's the actual basic reason we can't be in each other's lives, along with a bunch of other fucked shit.

During the dark time directly following the final break with my ex-fiancée I got so drunk in my backyard I walked into my neighbor's house, which was occupied by a bunch of twenty-somethings that also drank. Uninvited, their door unlocked, and as far as I could tell, nobody home, but I remember parts of it well enough to be sure of this: I was horny, and I meant to offer to fuck whichever of the girls happened to be home. I was drunk enough to think this plausible and to walk into their house, but not so drunk that I didn't realize what the fuck was happening, the fucking outlandishly insane and fucked up thing that I was fucking doing my god who the fuck am I, and leave immediately. I have not been that drunk since, have hardly even been tipsy--but I have taken drinks.

I have taken drinks, again, after shit like that and shit almost as bad. That is what an alcoholic is. Someone capable of continuing to drink even after shit like that.

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The third thing was much, much earlier, years and years ago, when I was living in this very house with my first ex. Don't remember anything leading up to sex, don't remember much about it, just dim flashes of me furiously fucking her. Like, angrily. Not like myself.

Asked her about it, the next morning, ashamed, weirded out, not sure if I should. She was flat and noncommittal. Women often are when you've acted like some kind of devil in human skin, raging or spitting contempt like acid. I let it lie. Have never forgotten it. 

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Okay, I feel sick. Haven't been sleeping well, and hey! Not sure I've helped my situation, here, with this typing. Christ oh fuck. Jesus. Drinking.


--JL