Hello weirdos! Did you all have a lovely weekend? Want to tell me all about it? I'll give a prize to the most interesting story. By "a prize" I mean I'll probably nod my approval and you should be around to see it. It's nearing midnight here and I'm not entirely sure how I'm still functioning because I'm very old and I need many hours of sleep to be a relatively functional human being. Anyways.
Yesterday Friend, her little sister and I sat in a coffee
shop for several hours doing Productive Things including but not
limited to job applications, poetry submissions and catching up on this very entertaining rugby blog.
You guys, applying for jobs while you’re comfortably employed is a luxury. Seriously,
when you’re not actually banking on finding something you can apply for
anything and everything. Oh, you say you want 5 years of management experience?
I managed to put on pants today. That
sounds comparable to me. The jobs I applied for: office manager of an
architectural firm, glass melter and hypnotist trainee. The jobs I was tempted
to apply for: experienced sign dancer, psychologist and auto body detailer. The
world is my oyster.
About midway through our Productivity, Friend turns to me
and says: Hey we’ve got a ton of booze at the house, wanna come over later? To
which my only logical response was obvs yes. Mostly because my hermitage had
reached an all-time low and I’d already watched every episode of Firefly. We
spent the ensuring hours drinking cheap beer, playing cards and learning to
play the ukulele so as to serenade our Missoula friends. Thanks to my recent
non-drinking habits, three beers knocked me unconscious on Friend’s couch.
I woke up there this morning and felt like a ball python was
constricting my head. My eyes hurt, my stomach ached and my hands were shaky. I
ripped a hubcap off the Biscuit pulling up to my house and briefly considered
leaving it where it had landed on the neighbor’s lawn. I spent the morning lying
very still in my bed, sipping water and watching movies about heroin. Watching heroin
addicts suffer through withdrawals makes my hangover feel less dramatic. And
they always remind me of Lucy and her macabre fascination. Does anyone else
think Ewan McGregor looks an awful lot like Marshall Mathers in Trainspotting? Unnerving.
Those of you who know me know I've struggled with drinking for a long time now. Only it doesn't seem so much like a struggle as an abusive relationship. Alcohol and I will get along great for awhile, and then tension starts to build. I start relying on it, self-medicating with it. I start acting like a total asshole, start disregarding relationships, start forgetting that other people exist. I start forgetting that I exist. About two years I ago I woke up one morning and realized I had been drunk for 3 months. I decided not to drink that day and experienced withdrawals. Cold sweat, dry heaving, skin crawling withdrawals. At this point I generally swear off the booze entirely for a month, two months. Then I'll have a beer with dinner. Or I'll take a shot at the bar and the downward spiral starts all over again.
Alcohol is such a normalized part of life for people my age that it's hard not to abuse it. Telling people you don't drink draws a negative reaction. Sometimes a borderline hostile reaction. Other times it just evokes a stronger peer-pressure response, reinforces the idea that they must get you drunk. Because they haven't seen you falling down in the bar, unable to get your goddamn eyes to focus, hitting your head on tables/chairs/the floor. They haven't seen you sob inconsolably, or piss yourself. Threaten to hurt yourself. Threaten to hurt other people. A friend of mine recently described me as "drunk, but not punch-your-girlfriend drunk yet".
There's nothing glamorous about binge drinking. There's nothing funny to me about losing myself to that void, to that other me. But we tell our stories like they're jokes and the only punchline is that this is real life. We laugh at the scrapes and cuts and bruises. The blown blood vessels around our eyes from the force of heaving our guts out. What do you do when it's just not funny anymore? I just don't think it's funny anymore.
And we laughed, you know? Because sometimes you'd rather cry.
Anyhow, we’ll chalk this one off as a loss on the Self
Improvement front. I guess you can’t win them all. I’m mostly glad I woke up
somewhere familiar, not on a dog bed in a stranger’s house in deep North Portland. Again. See? Getting a little bit better all the days.
Other than my misadventure last night, nothing much to report
on this front. The rain has resumed and appears prepared to continue
indefinitely. Tomorrow kicks off another wild and wacky work week, during which
I can only hope someone will be serenaded by a faux rock star. Do you all have big plans for the holiday? I think we're having a fire and grilling things and lighting things on fire. Mostly ULOL will be lighting things on fire [See previous post for my opinion on fireworks]. You weirdos better be safe... Don't blow yourselves up, or drink and drive or have unprotected sex!
I love you.
-b
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