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Saturday, August 25, 2007

"From a Member of Alanon"

I would like to comment that having gone through all that I have, there was ALOT that I didn't know. Well at least, I guess, that I never took to heart in as far as what I, me, myself should have. When things in my own personal situation had come to a point of devastion, that is when I investigated the view from the other side. Reading all that could be read from the view of those who drank and their stories. I've come to understand you and your peers so much better. In turn, this has made me question, re-think and change my attitude and view of those fighting this disease. The physical aspects are often most apparent, however, it is the mental, emotional, and spiritual.......the unseen....that is the hardest for those of us who have relationships with alcoholics to understand.This is what your stories have given to me. That glimpse inside to understand better what you feel, think ect. Being honest with ourselves is the hardest thing to face. Conquering our own defects is tough. Whatever side of the fence we come from in facing this disease, together, we learn from one another.

(There is a link to Alanon under the "usefull links" section in the right hand panel)

From "Bringing Back the Dead"

http://misunderstandingjesus.blogspot.com/
As far as careers in alcoholism go I think I’ve been fortunate. I go to meetings and look around and see a lot of hard miles on a lot of tired faces. I think I was around sixteen when I realized I was an alcoholic. Drank until I was 22. Came up with an excuse and quit until I was 36. Got divorced and decided it would be a good idea to resume my research into the effects of alcohol on a depressed, somewhat confused newly divorced male of 40. Still looking at the data but the results weren’t all that shocking. So for five years- half a decade- I drank. I didn’t do drugs. I did drugs when I was a kid and quickly became bored with them. I’m Scotch-Irish and so perhaps genetically predisposed to the pedestrian qualities of beer. I drank a little wine. I never was much for hard liquor. I did however drink some really good beer, for what its worth. Or expensive, anyways- I assume that’s the scale we’re using, since no liquor really did me any amount of good, really. I do know for certain it had nice packaging. Pretty bottles and cans, Stainless steel, porcelain with a fancy cork- all kinds of pretentious shit. Even that didn’t make me happy. There are signs alcoholics get- little yellow and red flags that god- or Allah or Jah or the mother ship if you will- send down to us to give us a little hand, presumably because they know we’re remedial and hobbled by the constraints of a blood alcohol level several times the legal limit. The little warnings come in many forms, but I think one of the easiest ones is when you begin to think that every waitperson is the slowest waitperson in the entire universe. After being sober for a time I realized that there is no waitress or waiter anywhere that can bring the drinks fast enough for a drunk like me- that’s just not humanly possible. In fact, if any one of them had my sense of humor they would have kept bringing them back as fast as I could consume them, just to see how quick they could get me unconscious. They could have had a drunk pool and made some side bets. But luckily for me not everyone has a weird, rye, twisted sense of humor, and instead I went through life wondering if there was a decent waiter or waitress anywhere in the world. Just the same- nowadays they can’t bring me iced teas or root beers quick enough either It’s just my burden to bear, I suppose. I drink fast.An alcoholic has to have tricks to get by- ways to prolong their languishing health. I used to eat two aspirin and two ibuprophen before bed, chased down with a couple pints of cold water. I trained myself to wake up every hour or two and I drink another pint or three during the night. Then I’d get up in the morning and eat another couple aspirin and ibuprophen and eat a nice, greasy breakfast and I’d be as good as….used. I’d be marginal at best. I’d feel better than if I hadn’t gone to all that trouble but about a hundred times worse than if my body wasn’t completely saturated with alcohol like it was. So I’d be wearing dark glasses to hide from the brightness of the sun, my body and head would have this dull ache that was just present in everything I did. I’d limp through the day pretending to be great and by 3:30 I’d be at the store picking up a twelve pack, knowing that the first couple would make me feel pretty all right. Of course after the first couple I never could get that feeling back and I’d spend the balance of the evening’s consciousness chasing after the illusion, the ghost of a feeling. Now I know it’s a myth- a fable- a not so carefully constructed illusion of this fantastic feeling that lasts exactly two drinks and then is always just over the next hill- or at the bottom of the next drink, as it were. The beauty of the set-up is that by the time you’d put in enough time to figure it out you were too drunk to accept it and you just kept steamrolling yourself right through whatever beverages were in front of you. Or me, anyhow. So that’s a chunk of how things have been in the past for me. And like I said- I was fortunate. My drinking career was short and despite what everyone has told me about setting goals too high and about living in the moment- I will never drink again. That’s kind of odd, thinking about that in the abstract. It seems like such a mundane thing- alcohol, standing on it’s own without the alcoholic attached. But that’s the way things are, and so this is the way I am. As stubborn as I was about quitting and going to AA- and as tenacious as I was to keep surviving my days and managing to work despite the crap I was putting myself through- I’m that determined and tenacious and stubborn about not falling into that trap again. My grandfathers on both sides were alcoholics. My mom’s dad died of sclerosis of the liver, my dad’s dad was a violent drunk and came to a violent end- drunk and on a tear he was shot to death by his second wife (in his defense she was a pistol champion and a crack shot.) Somehow it managed to skip my dad yet in an unfair turn of events he died of cancer of the liver and pancreas. Literally on his deathbed I promised him that I was done drinking. I figured it was worrying him and I knew it was worrying me, and at that time I felt really terrible that I could be piling one more worry onto the shoulders of a man that was facing the scariest thing any of us will ever face. Still it took me a year and eight months to put on the brakes. After dad died I stopped for a while, and then I drank more and more regularly than I ever had before. I don’t really know what it was that was driving me to do this but I have always had a feeling that something made me cease caring about my own well-being. I had all of the information and am a pretty intuitive guy- I would start out the day wanting to be this one person that is independent and strong and healthy and then as morning turned to afternoon and afternoon to evening at some point I would just say “fuck it.” And even though I knew it truly wasn’t what I wanted to do and didn’t work in the direction I wanted to be going- despite the knowledge that it was wrong for me and bad for me and that I was doing myself physical harm- and despite the sick feeling I got at the beginning of the first beer- I would do it anyhow. Sometimes I drove past the liquor store twice before finally pulling in- still agonizing and struggling with myself over the decision. The whole time I entertained thoughts of being this guy that I have in my head. I don’t know who he is- maybe me, maybe a conglomerate of people I admire- I don’t know. The whole time I also entertained visions of me going to AA and just facing my stuff and the future and getting back on track, but that was a thought that for some reason really scared me. In retrospect, that’s kind of funny. I’d done a ton of things and been a ton of things between the age of fifteen and 40, and here I was afraid to go to AA. A year and eight months after I told my dad I was done drinking I finally went to AA. It wasn’t any huge traumatic incident that did it like it is for some people. I didn’t wreck a truck or burn down the house or end up in jail like the stories that I’ve heard from other people. Honestly I think I just finally got tired of it. It wore me down. Even me- the guy that thought he could get through anything by sheer will- it wore me down. So here I am. I went to a meeting last night, like I do every other night or so. The meeting is a lot like the liquor store- always there, waiting for me- but the meetings are about a block farther down the road from my house. I while back before things got so serious I’d go a couple days between drunks. Then pretty soon it got to be a day between drunks. Then one day it just became drunk every night. It seems to be going backwards with meetings. It was every night for a while there, but now it’s about every other night. There are a lot of similarities between my life before and my life now. The big difference is it’s a hell of a lot less work to maintain my sobriety than it was to maintain my (active) alcoholism. Waitresses still seem to move at the same speed

Posted by Random Non Sequitur