My third day on zero alcohol. I went to sleep last night with none of that nonsense where I'm dozing off then jerk awake. But my sleep was in spurts. Sleep an hour or an hour and a half, wake up, sleep another hour and a half, get up to pee, sleep a bit more ... No nasty dreams though in fact hardly anything on that front and what I remember was pleasant. And no weird gyrations between being warm and cold, no shivering then sweating routine.
I'm not gonna go out today. I went out 2X yesterday so I've decided I don't have to today. I have 10 things total that have to go out but half of them aren't due to be shipped until the 6th and of the 5 that ought to get packed today, 3 are simple BUT two of them are these huge combination orders. One's all books and one's fluidics stuff.
A while back I decided that I'm not going to be so anxious about finding things and feeling like I'm an awful failure if I can't find this or that thing in the warehouse. As part of trying to be a better Buddhist, anger and anxiety and feeling bad about myself are not part of the program. But I've been reading a ton of r/stopdrinking and it seems that alcohol causes a high level of background anxiety in a lot of people. Huh. I thought alcohol was supposed to be relaxing, the only anxiety being when you're hooked on it and run out? That sounds like the situation with pot, which relaxes most people but just made me anxious the couple of times I tried it.
r/stopdrinking is fascinating. There are people who got into serious trouble just drinking a sixer of beer a day. A sixer of even a good strong IPA was nothing for me when I was seriously drinking. One thing I'm learning is that there's really no minimum safe amount. Yes the liver can restore itself but often not fully, so what remains becomes super sensitive to drink. That might be what happened with a guy I used to know, R., who got to where he could get seriously wasted on a few "vodka and crans".
Times with R. were ... interesting. He knew all the places to drink, and places to drink cheaply, like The Eagles club. We went to the Eagles for a Thanksgiving and while they didn't have Guinness they had Boddington's Pub Ale in tall cans and they are only about $2. I had $10 on me to drink on, and that got me 3 Boddington's Ales, tipping a buck on each one. R. was having his vodka and crans. When I'd finished my ales R. asked me why I'd stopped drinking and I said I was out of money, so he handed me $10 (out of couch-surfing rent I was paying him lol) so I could go on. There was home-made food, and it was very congenial.
R. always blacked out, in that he could do stuff but have no memory after. He wanted me to observe what he did because he could not figure out why he wasn't liked there. To go there, you have to be a member or have a member vouch for you. So I had a member, an utter stranger, vouch for me, and of course R. was a member so they couldn't keep him out.
I was pretty nice. I fended off the attentions of one of the bartenders, with the backing of another because the first was a weirdo. I got in an interesting conversation with a Black lady who was a businesswoman of some kind. I shot a game of pool with a Black guy and lost and took it quite good-naturedly when he turned down a 2nd game because I wasn't in his league.
So I went back to the bar and my Boddington's and more food, and was enjoying myself, being convivial with people I'd never met before, and it was easy to see why people join The Eagles because it's like a British pub. And R. just sat in a corner and drank his vodka and crans and looked around the room like he was some kind of room monitor. And he had the kind of eyebrows that make it very obvious he's looking at you, kind of making him look like an owl.
We finally struck out for home (his place where I was renting his couch) on foot, it being only a few blocks away. We're each carrying a plate of food, and it was a challenge to keep the hard-boiled eggs from rolling off of my plate. R. was on auto-pilot and not a very functional one. I was giving him orders, "Stop here" and "We turn left here" and so on. We managed to get back to his place OK.
The next morning, I was eating my plate of leftovers for breakfast and R. came blearily out of his room, and asked me about the night before. I said that I'd talked to people and when one gal bugged me and when I lost the game of pool I'd handled it well and I'd just been ... friendly. And he'd just sat in the corner looking around. He'd told me he honestly doesn't know what he does to alienate people there, whether he got into arguments or some other unpleasant thing. And all he did was sit in the corner and look around, that's all.
It's funny because he had at least OK socialization skills when he was sober, or what was sober for him. He'd been drinking since he was a teenager, working for Shakey's pizza and saving up the leftover beer customers left behind, pouring it into a pitch he kept back in the kitchen and drinking from it. And he told me about some phone bank job he had where he was part of a clique who would work drunk. Last heard of he drives for Uber in a black Prius he got somehow, drunk. I hope to never run into him again.
It's amazing what an elephant-in-the-room drinking culture is in the US, and well, tons of other places too. Tons of people can drink just fine, having a beer on the weekend or what have you, but tons more have no business drinking. If it were looked at as a disease with some having immunity and some not, it would be a huge matter. But since it's very profitable to sell the "virus", nothing is done. And while I can go to the doctor for any of a range of ailments, if I ask for, say, Librium or some other medicine to help go cold-turkey off of alcohol, that's not allowed. I'm told to go to a "rehab program" that costs thousands of dollars and has a 95% failure rate. That's why I discovered tapering. It's not fun or comfortable, but it works.
It seems the writer Stephen King was addicted to both alcohol and drugs for a while, "drinking, like, a case of beer a night" until his family staged in "intervention" in the form of throwing all the evidence of his addictions on his front lawn so I dunno, bunch of bottles and needles and stuff? Pill bottles? In any case, King quit right after and apparently has stayed sober since. When you have people you care about telling you what you're doing is Not Right, you very strongly want to not do it any more.
Which makes me think of the how and why and when of when I started drinking. Sure there was that experience with some of my dad's Gran Marnier at around age 12, but I only got into it because it as about the only thing with calories in the house, and afterwards I just thought of it as a silly kid thing. I'd sneaked some and put it in a Horlick's malted milk tablet bottle and drank it out in the garage. It made me feel warm and good, but then, we kids got the same feeling from Formula 44 cough syrup.
Then a guy down the street "made" us drink some malt liquor and that wasn't great at all. I remember walking up the hill home and sitting in the "papa san" chair in the living room watching dust specks and kind of halfway dozing off until the woozy feeling went away.
In the Army me and a friend went somewhere and ate I guess, and I remember we each had a Bartles & James and after one, decided that was enough. That was the only time I drank anything in the military and we were off the base anyway.
In college, or rather after I'd quit college I guess, I got a beer and drank it in my rooming house room. It felt a combination of good and bad and I felt it was not worth it.
What changed was moving to the mainland. Now, to be cool, you had to drink beer. No one I was around in Hawaii was so casual about drinking, much less encouraging it. I didn't like beer although I found that Coors wasn't so awful-tasting. I went to bars, mainly this one in Garden Grove but a couple-few others, with the idea if I hung out I'd find a girlfriend. Silly me! As I was told, if you look for a GF in bars, all you're going to find is a barfly.
I was introduced to Guinness this way: I was hanging out at Cook's Corner, no not to find a girl friend but because I was into riding motorcycles and it was a cool place. A riding friend, a Scots guy with a BSA 440 or something, introduced me to a friend of his, a British-Indian guy who used to be a motorcycle messenger, offered a drink if I followed him to this pub in Anaheim. He took off using all his bike-messenger bravado but I kept up so he couldn't lose me. We get to this place and he's got a table and puts this tall glass of the darkest beer I'd ever seen in front of me - even the foam looked a lighter brown. It seemed like a challenge, and I got the awful stuff down, except that once done it wasn't so awful, after all.
That was the start of my liking beer as opposed to just tolerating it to be sociable. I loved Guinness and also discovered things like Orangeboom which they'd tried to sell on the radio but it didn't do well, with the result that it was $2.99 for a 6-pack of bottles at Trader Joe's up on the corner, and it was strong.
Thus began years of drinking like that, I never got through a 6-pack of Orangeboom at one go, more like passing out after 3 or 4. And I could not dream of drinking more than 1 pint of Guinness. If I drank wine, it was a half bottle and bedtime. But the thing is, on the mainland that makes me an average drinker. In Hawaii I'd be considered a stinking sot. There's a shame in drinking at all if you're a student or doing anything serious. The students I was around, teachers, the veterinarian I worked for and all my co-workers, no one drank. At the company I finally worked for there, Fridays were about pizza (or other foods) and sodas. On the mainland, working for that same company, it was pizza and beers.
Maybe that's one of the few good things the Mormons and the missionaries gave us: a rather puritanical attitude about drinking.
Vietnam war - approx. 50k dead. Cars - approx 40k dead per annum. Alcohol - 90k dead per annum.
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