steadier on the heart

"He felt a flash of jealousy as do friends when they lose another to love, especially those who have understood that friendship is enough, steadier, healthier, easier on the heart. Something that always added and never took away."*

That quote sums up my experiences from the past few days. I've been maintaining my vow of fence-walking sobriety and because of that I have much less to write about. No one wants to read about your sunny picnic in the woods, my creative writing professor once told me, they only want to know about the ants and the lightning. Well, I have to say anyway that the weather has been fucking perfect.

Friday I did stay out late, chasing down a stupid party but having a lot of fun in the process, and I got to see an old friend of mine (and we drank together, which felt like for the first time) and if she were writing this blog she'd have to tell you about falling off her bike, over and over again at the same intersection.

The rest of my weekend I spent riding my bike on the trail, finishing a book (the Inheritance of Loss) and starting a new one (La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver). It's nice to wear shorts again and be busy outside. Staying busy is really the trick. Now that I have band practice to look forward to and my upcoming trip to Mexico, staying in and not drinking seems easier. After this weekend, which I plan on being incredibly, stark raving wasted (just kidding, I swear) the drummer in my band and myself are going to go on a Black Metal Master Cleanse, in which we do that stupid water-lemon-cayenne pepper-maple syrup-water diet but also only listen to black metal while we do it. That starts Monday and I'm sure I'm going to have a lot to document, it will be probably be depressing, and incredibly awful, and you'll have a lot of fun reading it.

*The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai, pg. 273

A: And Poetry? Q: And Poetry.

"How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid."*

I woke up early today, before noon, to ride the Hawthorne trail and enjoy wearing shorts (sunshine, thank god, finally). Robbie asked me how my blog was doing and I felt a little uneasy. That's right. I'm suppose to be documenting everything, and I forgot a little. It's really just the same, I went a day or two drinking within my limit and then Friday I blew it way off field, stayed up until 5am so drunk I couldn't see and then slowly transitioned into feeling weird and then just bad. Saturday was practically ruined on a hangover and Sunday I stayed out too late again and watched two of my friends try to fight each other. Or maybe that was Monday. Either way, the same up and down issue I've been having. So yesterday I made a decision to just steel myself against drinking. I have to stay sober and be alone no matter how difficult it seems. It does seem difficult, let me assure you. I've been reading Moby Dick, the Good Thief, and 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair the past few nights but being sober leaves me with a kind of restlessness I'm not accustomed to. Easily mistaken for loneliness, it's the realization that thing's aren't going to change. I have to stay in my room at 3am, and it doesn't matter if I'm awake, alone, and thinking about how much of a loser I am (or nuclear holocaust, or Discharge records, or books I'd like to write, or boys I'll never meet again), I have to deal with it and go to sleep anyway. When I'm really drunk, everything is funny when I'm alone at night. I can go to sleep without feeling restless, I can go to sleep without feeling anything at all.

Instead, I'm going to try to spend more time alone. I'll ride my bike everyday if I have to. I'll finish Moby Dick. I'll write more (actually write, not just blog, sorry). I'll act on all the sickening feelings and restless impulses until I have something more to show for myself than a hangover. Eh, we'll see.

*Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Life of Crime

"And then he lost his memory, as during the times of forgetfulness, and he recovered it on a strange dawn and in a room that was completely foreign."*

I groaned to myself a little when I woke up in Athens, Georgia, without my pants on the kitchen floor. I know I didn't do anything bad, or otherwise inappropriate, but I certainly lost some hours on Monday night. I remember the show, which wasn't as good as Friday's but still worth the drive, and I remember thinking I had to drink as much as I could before the bar closed at 2, but being handed more beer at Jill's house. I think I would have liked to remain coherent but everyone assured me I was funny. The car ride home was miserable, I curled up in a ball in the back seat under my leather jacket and felt kind of awful for six hours. Back in Gainesville I tried going to the Chronic Youth/Diet Cokeheads show at the Atlantic but couldn't get past two drinks and walked home, cold, tired and sad.

Today I had a margarita and a PBR, convinced myself everything could get better, and walked Kaysie home from the Top.

*One Hundred Years of Solitude pg. 69

Annihilation Times

"[He] did not know at what moment or because of what adverse forces his plan had become enveloped in a web of pretexts, disappointments, and evasions until it turned into nothing but an illusion."*

At work tonight I drank a frozen Tequila sunrise, despite the room temperature of 63 degrees, and contemplated my failures from the past few days. I'm not sure if they can really be considered "failures," since I've been having a Really Good Time, but I've certainly been drinking too much. On one hand, a few people around me have been acting considerably worse than me, so maybe I should be evaluating myself on a curve and be sort of proud of the fact that I wasn't the kid passed out next to the barrel fire (and subsequently pouring beer on his burns), or the kid running into a bands' equipment at a show, or one of the several people trying to pick fights about meaningless aesthetics. On the other hand, I stayed up until 4:30am when I knew I had to work at 10 the next day, and last night I stayed up past sunrise and wasted my day feeling sorry for myself. How do I measure this kind of bullshit?

Thursday night I didn't end up working, which was good since I had drank a quart of Miller High Life in the early evening. At the bar I ended up doing shots (this is where the trouble starts, maybe? Can anyone notice a pattern?) and having two more beers, then moving over to the Top where I had another draft beer and another shot. I'm happy I left the bar, because it seems like even when I'm drunk and maybe even acting stupid, it seems to be a lot more fun when it's with my friends in their houses or in their backyards. I wound up at 6th place, complete with more beer and poppers (again, theme for the week). I got in an argument with someone named Burnout over a cigarette and stayed up too late staring into the fire thinking about the inevitable cold walk home, and the cold empty bed waiting for me at the end. I think I was very close to "acting stupid" but I didn't quite cross the line. Luckily, I got myself home and then to work 5 hours later.

Yesterday I worked for 9 hours, then went to the Junkyard to see Brain Killer, Scapegoat, Mauser, and Religious as Fuck. I know I went there with 4 beers, which is one past my limit, but I also had a Margarita before I left and bought more beers afterward. All the bands were really fucking amazing, and a lot of my friends were in town. I think I maybe I stayed up a little too late, but after the show we had a really good time annihilating Adrien's kitchen by smashing the ceiling lights over each other's heads and basically just laughing and hurting ourselves but in a kind of benign way. Once again, we did poppers and got other people to do them with us, and I think this morning I sort of swore I'd never do them again but I know that's a flat out lie.

The show and subsequent hang out were everything that I like about my friends and how we interact, and reminded me why I don't really like bars. I keep wondering though if I would have been able to talk to more people or have better conversations sober, and that's the thought that's really driving my little experiment. In any case, failure or not, it's been a really good weekend.

*One Hundred Years of Solitude pg. 13

01/04/10 and 01/05/10

"One has a great time rocking out to a band drunk but in the end can't remember if they were all that good. Same goes with girls. There were lots of them but it wasn't like other first kisses. They were fun and sloppy but lacked real feeling, lacked depth and nuances, lacked subtlety and restraint; some of the best things about kissing."*

It occurs to me that I haven't had a first kiss sober in a really long time. Maybe that should have been one of my goals for 2010, but I think I threw out kissing people with the whole bread basket of drinking less (don't throw away the bread with the basket, is that how that anecdote goes?). Not that it would work out though, my bed has been full lately with two cats and a very lonely roommate.

Monday night I tried to drink a Miller Lite that was left on a table while I was working. Totally disgusting. I didn't even finish it. Afterwork I drank a Jameson and gingerale and I think it may have made me feel a little extra warm for the bike ride home, but then I spent a few hours trying to fall asleep thinking about (what else?) kissing people.

Yesterday I broke my limit again. I had a Yuengling with Kaysie at the bar around 6, and then watched some action movies with 2 High Lifes. Then I had band practice, and when there's band practice there will be drinking, in this case 2 shots of some generic Whiskey and a Busch. I didn't get drunk though, which helped since it was our first practice. I know last time I was in a band I was drunk about the whole time, and I still feel uncomfortable when I think about our sometimes sloppy shows, and how dismissive I was toward other people when I was more concerned with entertaining myself. If I get a chance to be different in this band I will.

*from the zine Blurt No. 1

blood spit nights

"This is a disaster," he said, "look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too."*

My first failure. Yesterday Izzy celebrated her birthday by playing the Ramones over a PA on an abandoned tennis court, for at least seven hours, at her new house next the prairie. I got there around 2 with her and Eric, and had my first two Budweisers while I built a fire and waited for everyone else to show up. Maybe it's the cold, or maybe it's my resolution, but I managed not to drink anymore beer during the party. I had two cups of red wine after the sun went down, aware that I was breaking my 3 drink rule, but happy that I was drinking slowly and not acting like a jackass. I felt pretty coherent by the time I left at 8, and decided to go out again, which in retrospect was where I made my mistake.

At Adrien's house I had 3 Natural Ice's, 1 PBR, 1 Full Moon (seasonal chic), all interspersed by inhaling poppers. If you don't know what poppers are, I'm not fully prepared to explain them, but needless to say I was dizzy on the very cold bike ride home. After the 2nd or 3rd beer I began feeling a little sentimental, because it's nice to be huddled around a space heater with some of your best and oldest friends, listening to the Swankys, drinking beer and blacking out on poppers (you can't imagine the laughter it inspires), and it's a scene that's just like a hundred other nights you've had, but it's still nice, and you feel like maybe you could still be in love with some of these people and you are, and you know you'll keep coming back to rooms like this and people like this because it makes you feel less lonely, and it's hard to turn down drinks when you start feeling this sappy. Still, I didn't forget anything, I didn't say anything stupid, and I didn't really do anything I regret except maybe drinking 1 or 2 beers too many.

I might remedy this situation by not drinking anything for the next two days, but then again, I might not.

*One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg. 80

01/01/10 and 01/02/10

"Thus they went on in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters."*

I made up my mind about drinking less before I made up my mind about writing everything down. A customer at work brought up the idea, he said he'd written down everything he would drink for a month in order to add up all the calories. I don't really care about calories, but maybe it's something else I need to be adding up entirely. Anyway, the past two days have been easy.

Friday night I didn't even plan to go out. Gainesville has officially gotten cold, real fucking cold, and I planned on spending my night cuddled up next to my space heater and the internet. Instead I labored out of the house with my leather jacket and my roommate and headed out to the house show on the South East side. It being Friday, and ourselves being ourselves, we stopped by the bar first. I told myself originally, no more than three drinks at a time, and hopefully with one or two exceptions I can keep that as a general rule for my little experiment, or goal, or whatever the fuck it is. So far, so good. I had a shot of tequila and a Tecate, and she drank a Modelo. I forget what we talked about, but I think we just had one of those nice easy conversations about boys where we never really come to any conclusions other than that they're cute and kissing them is fun. I had one more shot, this time with her, and she had another beer while I finished mine. Exactly three drinks. We went to the show, got cold, tried to have fun around the fire, watched St. Dad cover Joy Division, got cold some more, and got a ride home after the cops showed up. I think it was the first house show I've been to in awhile where I wasn't drinking a four pack of tall boys.

Today I went on some sort of suburban shopping adventure with my friends. We ended up at Satchels and I had a glass of red wine. Later, at work, I drank another glass of red wine while I was closing. Also while at work I had the aforementioned conversation that led me to this, wide awake at 3:30 in the morning. Cheers to the New Year, and may my reality continue to be merry, and bright.

*from One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg 49.

2010

At the end of 2009 I finished reading White Teeth by Zadie Smith, for the first time, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for about the tenth time, and I spent my secular holiday worrying quite a bit about repeating mistakes, sabotaging myself, and otherwise fucking up my life. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, and if anything I think my real New Year's Eve will be June 1st, which is the day I officially moved to Gainesville, in which case I'll let the self-loathing come rolling in, but I did wake up on the last day of 2009 with a little idea. It's a little idea I've had for the past few months now, and it's that maybe, just maybe, I should start drinking less. So this is my plan, I'm going to try my hardest, and I'm going to document it so that maybe I can come up with some conclusions or in the very least some perspective. This blog, my first by the way, will fall somewhere in between observation and understanding. I hope so anyway.