Booze

When I quit drinking in 1993, a doctor convincing me it was this or hit the blue yonder, I never assumed I was quitting for life. I expected to drink, for example, if I learned I had a terminal illness. I assumed I'd go out partying.

But now I'm not so sure. What's interesting to me, after all this time, is what little desire I have for booze. What I miss about my drinking days are not the beverages but the laughter and camaraderie of my drinking buddies (before we all got too wasted to be entertaining). One of my VA counselors in treatment tried to get me to think of these times as the "bad old days" but I refused. Fuck fooling myself. These were great times! I wouldn't trade them for anything.

There was a lot in treatment that made no sense to me -- especially since my VA job was to work in the medical library, where I read European journals about alcoholism and treatment and discovered a far different mindset than the quasi-religious hidden-Christian formula of 12-step AA programs. Knowledge is frowned upon in AA -- "keep it simple, stupid" -- so an intellectual like myself was constantly being lectured about being in denial etc, ad nauseam, and if it weren't for my primary counselor, who fed me books officially "forbidden" by the program (because they were critical of AA), I would have had a far less transforming experience, I think. (For the record, I am not against AA per se, just the AA monopoly in our society.)

My program was knowledge. Hear that, AA? My program was knowledge, and it has worked for 18 years now. I think I'm the only one in my VA class still sober. Even one of my counselors relapsed. It's because I'm not powerless, as AA maintains, but existentially powerful through knowledge. The gravity of booze doesn't affect me if I refuse to jump off the building in the first place.

But I still want to party if I get a terminal disease. I just have to find the right way to do it.