TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

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Happy baker’s dozen birthday, blog!

If you’ve read since the beginning (Hey, Mazog! And Betsy.), you know that this all started because I decided to attempt the Master Cleanse—a ten day hell that includes consuming very little except for laxative tea and nightly cocktail of salt water in an effort to cleanse your body of impurities (i.e. shit out your colon). It seemed like the supposed spiritual clarity that comes with the cleanse would distract me from my stomach eating itself, but I mostly felt waterlogged and bitchy so I quit after thirty-six hours, at which point I drove to a twenty-four hour diner and ate mac ‘n cheese so fast that I burned my esophagus. I kept up the facade as if I were still practicing spiritual anorexia until I was busted with cheese fries and an Americano a few days later.

At that point, I could have ditched the blog, but writing gave me something to do during class and I figured that if I’m going to tell people I’m a writer, I might as well write, so I kept at it. After the aborted cleanse, I wrote mostly about stupid shit I’ve done. I had a lot of those stories to tell. I also started to write about the comings and goings of the neurotransmitters hanging in my gray matter, specifically, my couch-sitting adventures in therapy. A year later, I’m still spending a hour week discussing my problems with a problem expert—and at times, discussing other peoples’ problems because I’ve run out of my own. Therapy has gotten boring, but I’m still into the blog.

So what has changed in the past thirteen months of writing this very Googlable, very public, private diary? Well, I broke up with a job or two, divorced graduate school, spent six months living/drinking on the dole, got the world brunch tattooed on my arm in a failed attempt to permanently secure my place in the middle-class, moved into a new place but forgot to get the electricity hooked up and then sweltered in the dark for four days, danced in a horsehead and corduroy pasties whilst waving a machine gun around and being ridden by fifty-year-old seemingly homeless front man who is actually not homeless but sleeps on a velvet sofa in the basement of a bar called the Mansion. Also, a bunch of the gays moved away and now only a third of my friends are queer, which is weird because I have to explain things like how you can tell a dyke by the length of her fingernails. Also, my other butt cheek moved away, and I flew across the country to meet someone from the Internet (sort of). And that’s about all that’s happened.

Actually, there is one other thing… new pussy! Kidding. But I am now a person with a person—a person with a person I like more than the Monday crossword, which is the only one I can do, and more than my four-poster bed, which is a grown-up tree-house and my favorite place to sleep, and more even than my 1990 Don Mattingly baseball card with a stick of gum still in the pack. But being a person with a person really is different. I’m not so restless right now. I’m happy doing boring stuff with The Cutest Girl Ever even though her feet sometimes feel like she wears socks made of ice and also I sometimes have to roll her on her side because she snores way bigger than one would think possible for such a pretty young thing. This is a good thing and a different thing and maybe a thing I wasn’t ready for a baker’s dozen months ago. So that’s different.

Some highlights from the past year-ish of blogging:

Answering questions you didn’t actually ask

Analyzing your personality/fridge

Co-opting Facebook memes to make myself look smart/kill time while waiting for my unemployment check

Communicating with my family almost entirely through Gchat

Text Message From A Stranger

And, mostly, bitching about not knowing what I want to be when I grow up.

And now I’m going to say something serious. Ready? Thanks for reading this. Not to get all Christmas sweater and menorah, but I’m grateful for everyone who takes time to read my blog when you could be planting virtual trees on your Facebook farm or judging Tiger Woods or writing Twlight fan fiction. The blog has been good for me, if for no other reason than at least it’s not quite as big a lie when I tell people I’m a writer now. It’s sometimes been a pain in the ass, but it’s mostly been a good pain in the ass, like the kind you get from a dude named Hank at a truck stop. So thanks for reading this. It’s a thing.

This year, Thanksgiving is at your house. You thought that your first time hosting a holiday less drink-oriented than Halloween would feel momentous, like buying your first dishwasher or pledging to NPR, but you haven’t actually bought a dishwasher or donated to NPR. Rather, your parents are renovating their kitchen and your brother is with his wife’s family and your sister winters in Des Moines, so your parents come to you. They not only bring the entire contents of their refrigerator—including two heads of past-date lettuce and an unopened jar of mayonnaise—they also bring a full-size charcoal grill and several rolls of toilet paper in case you ran out and were planning on going through the coffee filters first.

Holidays are about getting drunk with people you love either because you want to or because you have to. Over-pouring the Pinot that your parents bought and confessing that it was you who broke the Victrola ten years ago, not the Guatemalan exchange student, is the highlight of any holiday. It is also something you don’t take part in because you don’t drink around your parents. The reason for your familial sobriety is because you made a grand mistake two years ago after your girlfriend found out you cheated on her more than once and more than twice and more even than three times. She was white-washed when she found out, shocked, like the person shared ice cream and washed the dishes with her was a mirage, a stranger, a non-person. You decided then that you are either a fundamentally bad person or an alcoholic. Alcoholism seemed easier to cure than a black soul, so you called your parents in the midst of a metaphysical hangover and told them that you are a drunk, and, not only that, you have been since you were eighteen or maybe twelve or maybe even when you were still a parasite in the mobile home of your mother’s womb.

There are a lot of things you can take back. I no longer love you, I want to move out, Give me back favorite hoodie—who hasn’t said or heard these words? But, I’m an alcoholic is the pinkie swear of confessions, the nickname you can’t seem to shake. And because you never actually stopped drinking, you pretend that you’re comfortably saddled to the wagon around your parents. Your dry liver is an obvious counterfeit when your parents look at your recycling bins when they come up for Thanksgiving, but you attribute the empties to your roommate and they believe you because they want to believe you. The only time your father overtly asks about your drinking is when you’re picking up last minute cranberry sauce at the grocery store and a bartender picking up last minute stuffing yells, Dude! You have to stop walking out on your tab! when he sees you. You tell your dad you drink soda water and eat bar nuts and sometimes forget to pay.

It’s a lie, those glasses of water and handfuls of nuts. You actually spend a lot of time at one bar, your neighborhood bar, an everybody-knows-your-name bar, a bar where wet hounds look up when the door opens, wondering who new people are. Is this sad? Sometimes. Sometimes not. You’ve had exceptionally fun nights at this bar: nights when the shots melt your faceplate and you dance around the pool table and pour beer your head and stumble home, a walk you won’t remember in the morning but you will still wake up happy to be a part of this drunken family. There are also touching moments, like when a rainbow arcs over the sky and everyone walks outside and stands and blinks at the colorful yawn above. Or maybe there’s a hail storm and everyone turns on their stools to look out the windows at the ice splitting windshield and pavement. Despite the occasional monkey barrel nights, however, bar culture is measles for certain aspects of you life, like, for instance, your bank account, which you’ve stopped paying attention to because the daily bar charges make you feel like what you’ve decided that you’re not: an alcoholic.

But can you decide you aren’t an alcoholic? Maybe not. Maybe as soon as those words exit your mouth, they are always and forever true. After your mistaken announcement to your parents, you started thinking about drinking all the time. That is the worst part of thinking you’re an addict: it’s boring. You are always aware of the hour when you would usually go to the bar but are not going to go to the bar, definitely not, unless this coin lands heads up, in which case you will take it as a sign that you should drink. You attended a couple of AA meetings after your mistaken announcement but hearing people talk about booze made you thirsty. Some people say that they aren’t into AA because of the Jesus thing and you agree that putting your problems and fate and your glass in the hands of an invisible man who lives on a cloud pillow makes no sense. Why make yourself feel powerless when getting sober takes power? But you mostly hated the meetings because you didn’t want to be one of the those people. You didn’t want to see yourself in their stories and their sadness and their sobriety. So you kept drinking and if you didn’t drink one night, you woke up elated, not because you were clear-headed and pain-free, but because a sober night deserved a party, and what better way to party than to party?

Recovery programs talk about addiction as a disease, but you know it’s less the flu and more your inability to recognize your own humanness, to recognize that you are a living being who will someday be a dying being and then someday be a non-being, just scattered cells and quiet atoms. This is what addicts don’t accept: their own unshakable death. This surprising considering that they see the symptoms of physical demise when they wake up cloudy and heavy. It’s not just their hands that shake, it’s their brains, a Parksonian tremor that slows after the first fifteen minutes of happy hour and stops when happy hour has past but they’re still at the bar. This is why you don’t drink in front of your parents. You don’t have that tremor but you can’t take it back.

Your Thanksgiving might have been small—just you and your parents, equal parts Perrier and Pinot—and the turkey might have been grilled, but you still said your blessings and recited your thanks. To good friends and good health and good luck. Afterward, you wonder if you will toast with sparkling grape juice at every Thanksgiving. Will you never again get drunk at a family reunion, one aunt passed out in a lawn chair, another dancing a little too sexy, a grandfather lost in his glass? Or will you someday know, really know, that is wasn’t true, that you were never an alcoholic, the tremors were imaginary, that it wasn’t a disease, it was a mistake. Maybe after you buy the dishwasher and donate to NPR, you will be able to tell your parents this, and maybe the next time Thanksgiving is at your house you will hold your glass in your hand, lift it to your mouth, and toast to friends and to health and to luck and to parents who bring their grill and their toilet paper and their belief in you.