On Sobriety

I'm something like ** days sober.

The weight of it doesn't elicit surprise on my part, b/c the last few days I'd honestly not even thought about my sobriety date, how many days sober, et cetera. Been busy with work and the gym and just living in the present.

Not every day is chock full of cupcakes, kittens and sunshine, but I'm fortunate that I don't get the urge to drink as often as I thought I would/expected to when I made the decision to get help. For that, I am grateful. It's been an adjustment in the sense that my social circle no longer really exists but I don't miss what passed for friendship during my active addiction. I haven't made many if any new friends in recovery beyond those I met in treatment, but right now, I'm taking each day slowly as I reintegrate into the world I left behind that must now change as I have to change.I retain few very close, very good, actual friends from before I got sober/clean and again, for that, I am grateful.

On meeting new people:
There's still something forced about the whole meeting people at meetings but the most important thing is simply knowing that I do not have to pick up a drink or use and that as simple as it sounds is somehow the most profound knowledge I gained in all of this. There was a sick thrill in the wrongness of my exploits which I relished for quite some time, but with age and consequences mounting, and perhaps an in-articulable desire to bring my beliefs into congruency, I didn't enjoy my forays into the depths of the maelstrom with the same fervor I once did.

I heard Lindsay Lohan voice some AA staples about the physical allergy to alcohol the other night whilst she hosted Chelsea Lately. Imagine that, I get sober around the same time as Lindsay Lohan.

All good things must come to an end and I'd long since lost much of my enjoyment when it comes to drinking and riding the razor's edge. I've had to reframe a lot of the views and beliefs I've held for far too long in my life and this is truly uncharted territory as to who and what I actually am beyond the false sense of self I'd elaborately constructed. You reach a point of truly diminishing returns when it comes to being a wild and crazy malconent &  hellraiser.

It feels good to start with a fresh for the most part canvas with only a few remnants of my previous life like the gym and well, actually, that's about it. I don't know what sobriety means for this blog or for my writing.
I do know that in order for me to stay alive and out of jail I have to stop riding the rollercoaster and stop buying tickets for said ride.

I said this blog wouldn't continue when I got married and that proved untrue despite how sincere I felt at the time.
I could say this blog won't continue now that I'm sober but that may prove untrue despite how sincere I feel at this time.
That would also mean I am thinking far beyond the present and far beyond one day at a time, and "Just for Today".

I don't have any answers as to whether or not the blog will continue and I honestly don't know if my new task should be to provide the diary of recovery that my blog was previously for the madmen and mad women of the underground mired in the leviathan's belly that is impulse and self-destruction.



I am currently doing 90 meetings in 90 days and I've already been saddened to learn of a number of those I knew in treatment already relapsing or not even completing treatment and returning directly to active addiction. 

The monkey may be off my back, but the circus is always in town. 

Good luck and happy hunting.
I leave it to those of you still fighting to hoist the black flag in my stead.
Your humble narrator as you knew him is no more.
      - Yrs. in Christ

Oddly enough, in passing, I'm reminded of personification of the cold in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle when describing active addiction: "They could feel the cold as it crept in through the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing fingers; and they would crouch and cower, and try to hide from it, all in vain. It would come, and it would come; a grisly thing, a specter born in the black caverns of terror; a power primeval, cosmic, shadowing the tortures of the lost souls flung out to chaos and destruction. It was cruel iron-hard; and hour after hour they would cringe in its grasp, alone, alone. There would be no one to hear them if they cried out; there would be no help, no mercy. And so on until morning—when they would go out to another day of toil, a little weaker, a little nearer to the time when it would be their turn to be shaken from the tree. "