The last time I took a drink was September 10th, 2021. A few days later, someone told me that there’s a debate as to when your ‘sober birthday’ is—some say it’s the last day you take a drink, some say it’s the first day you get through without one. Given that the latter was going to be the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I opted for the tenth. (Of course, now today is analogous with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, so I guess I just have to live with that.)

It’s difficult to write about sobriety for any number of reasons. For one, if you aren’t an alcoholic or an addict, there’s simply no way to understand it. I could talk about chemistry and obsession for pages and it wouldn’t clock with someone unaffected because there’s nothing like addiction within the rest of the human experience. To put it plainly, most people can have a drink to unwind at night. If I had even a sip of wine tonight, it would take a miracle for me to ever stop. The only way for me to stop drinking is to never start.

So it’s been five years and I still don’t really know what to say about it. Everyone has a different battle with this thing, even sober, and mine has not been particularly easy—partially due to other mental health issues, and partially due to the fact that I have this notion that alcoholism is this illness like cancer that just is supposed to filter out people over time. Keep nature balanced somehow. Maybe alcoholics are supposed to just live hard and fast and not see the second half of life. Maybe I’m spitting in the face of nature right now.

Celebrations

I know plenty of people who fucking love sobriety. They’re all smiles at AA meetings and they have found a new lease on life. It’s proof that the 12-step programs work. I go to meetings because they help me not drink, but I have certainly not found any sense of joy in living through listening to and sharing stories. I make sure to not bad-mouth AA or anything like it because I’ve seen it help enough people that I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone who might need a program from trying one out. The flip side of that coin is, though, when everyone around you seems to be feeling better and better all of the time while you don’t, it makes it harder to think that life is more worthwhile without a drink in hand.

Anyway, I don’t know. Every year around this time I go through the same struggle. I still don’t feel like myself anymore, and with each passing year, the idea of existing as a stranger in my own body and mind is more difficult to deal with. This is the one life I have, after all. I want to spend it how I want to spend it, and now most of the way I live is for how other people want me to be. People in recovery say, Don’t leave before the miracle happens, but I don’t believe in miracles. Everyone congratulates me and I really couldn’t care less. This feels more like condemnation than living, and I’m not getting any younger.

However, I do know these are largely selfish and self-destructive thoughts. Most days it’s about trying to find reasons to care. I’m a person who lives for the full experience of being alive and nothing allowed me to feel the entire spectrum of emotion quite like a drink. It’s a double-edged sword because that extreme also replaced every relationship, subdued every ambition, and deviated me from any direction I was trying to take my life. The fact I thrive in chaos really helped, but for the most part, everything was a mess. I get it, but I also prefer it. Five years in and it has been the worst half-decade of my life, at least in terms of the things I care about. But people say I’m ‘doing better.’ I just don’t believe them.

I had to spend a couple days in the hospital. It is what it is, I feel like the people around me were way more stressed out about it than I was. For whatever reason, this sort of thing just doesn’t phase me. (I have heard that alcoholics specifically are exceedingly good in high-stress situations, which is part of the reason they’re so insane when life is just kind of boring.) But anyway.

A few observations I had during my stay in Pasadena about the experience and/or the state of the US healthcare system:

My view for a couple days

One: Repeating yourself becomes craze-inducing.
I had to answer the same set of questions about 17 or 18 times. Most of them were covered by my initial referral from my primary care physician. I couldn’t tell if doctors just never talk to one another (more on that later) or if the notes they take are just so brief that, even if the next one down the line reads it, so many details get left out that they have to ask again. Nobody seems on the same page and it creates a real sense of doubt.

Two: The profiteering is grotesque.
I take two daily psych meds and brought them both with me. Upon being admitted, the hospital confiscated these and said they will bring me their meds from their pharmacy each day I needed them. Of course, when they were brought up to me, the little individual packets were scanned into their system for an inevitable charge. (My 200mg dose pill was also broken up into two, 100mg doses for that extra charge.) On top of healthcare already being overpriced, this felt like outright theft.

Three: Conclusions are not really that conclusive.
After two-and-one-half days of procedures, tests, questions, and lying around waiting for the next set of procedures, tests, or questions, I had about four wrap-up visits with relatively high-up specialists or department heads. Each one gave me a generally different answer as to what their belief was as to why I ended up at the hospital to begin with. (To be fair, the initial issue was kind of wild.) But, like having to constantly repeat myself answering questions to begin with, leaving without actually having any confidence as to what was—and possibly still could be—wrong feels pretty disorienting.

Honestly, I had what was overall a good experience. My initial wait in the ER was just a few hours (granted I went at 10:00 pm). The hurry-up-and-wait parts of my visit were not out of hand. Everyone was nice. And still the only thought I had at the end was, Don’t get sick in America. The healthcare situation is so dismal here, I cannot understand why people defend it against the idea of a universal, public system.

I moved recently. Or, perhaps, I’m in the process of moving. I still have some floors to vacuum and trash to throw away and a microwave to drive from East Hollywood to MacArthur Park. Nevertheless, things are in motion and perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to begin writing online once again. Clean slates, fresh starts, et cetera.

I can’t exactly say why I stopped to begin with. It was a number of factors. My usual writing partner (a stiff drink) has been out of my life for coming up on five years now and, to be honest, it’s been proving incredibly challenging to get in the mood for anything creative while sober. Drinking can be a destructive habit, sure, but it also allowed for me to blur out the mess of the world and focus on just what I was feeling. Without that assistance, the overwhelming existential weight of everything makes the idea of writing, drawing, or even getting out of bed in the morning feel like a pointless endeavor. What good is it to do anything in America these days, anyway?

Then there’s the Dead Internet Theory, which contributes even more to the tsunami of What the fuck am I even bothering with any of this for? thought patterns that plague every spark of inspiration I may get these days. With most of the internet a devolving dialogue between bots and the rest of it a grotesque monetization scheme amidst the dying embers of capitalism, contributing to the static doesn’t feel like a valuable way to spend my time. (This is to say nothing of a declining literacy rate and the fact most people get content in short-form video now.)

Anyway, I’m moving, and I don’t know if it’s my new IP address or just the timing, but from my new place I can no longer watch YouTube videos. The site requires I sign in (I do not have an account) in order to view any of their content. For whatever reason, this pushed me over the edge and I guess re-starting this little blog is my way of putting one more site on the internet that doesn’t track its audience—no required log-in, no storing of cookies. Just whatever bullshit I come up with, free to any and all to read or leave.

So we’ll see where this goes, or if I can maintain it. I’ve taken down all the writing and work archives, as it’s been too long since I’ve painted anything and don’t really feel like hosting shit from ten years ago. I guess it was good while it lasted.