Loss

The drinking:

I did this; that's all I can say...

In the back of my mind, I always wondered if "complete" abstinence, with regards to anything, was "the way to go."

I truly believed that the 2 and a half glasses of red wine that I had with my healthy meals just about every single night for years (meals that turned out to be pretty shining examples of the "keto" diet -mainly fish partly fried in olive oil, partly baked and partly smoked over either a red or white oak, or hickory wood fire with a lot of vinegar-based hot sauce poured over it, with a side of sauteed mushrooms, broccoli, onions, garlic, ) were a big contributor to the fact that, even though I was homeless, I could say: "At least I have my health."

But, then I also saw how the 3 quarter bottle of wine started turning into a whole bottle, and then how the brilliant idea of buying 3 liter jugs, at a cost of what amounted to about $2.50 a bottle, would save me all kinds of money, with the reasoning being that I was already spending about 6 bucks a day on a single bottle; so why not get a jug that would last 4 days?
I then saw the 3 liter bottle lasting only 2 and a half days; and then, it went from there.
I got to the point where I would black out, and would actually be proud of it: "What did we do last night?," I might ask my camp mate, Larry.

And, then I thought it was helping me musically, because, in order to improvise music, you have to shut down the rational, logical and critical thinking part of the mind, and, what better way than being so drunk that you are going to open your guitar case the next morning to discover money in it and assume, I must have played somewhere last night, and must have sounded OK...

But, there was no future in beer drinking. I can see that by looking at photos of myself from around the time I was with Karrie. Was my nose so red because I had been out in the sun all day, or did I have a cold and had just finished blowing my nose?

There was stuff in that cheap malt liquor that my body was merely tolerating. Perhaps the alcohol was sedating me and knocking me out so that I wasn't aware of the toxic accumulation of whatever, with the payoff being that I would have no inhibitions about setting up in front of some random store and busking away until a few dollars went into the jar, or the manager came out of the store to run me away. Of course this radical type of action kept the alcohol flowing...


But, it was Halloween night.
The night before, Jacob and I had busked and made nothing at all, as costumed people walked by, apparently hiding behind the anonymity of the costumes in order to not feel personally obliged to tip us; as if we would never be able to match their faces to their cheapness.

And, it was a cold night. I wasn't going to go out to play, even though on the surface it promised to be a good night.
And, somehow, it seemed like a big can of good beer would warm my blood (and release me from the ego driven count up of "days sober" which, in an of itself means little unless as a way to belittle hopeless alcoholics, or unless some blessings flow due to the sobriety).


That was a failure. The big can of beer was a downer from the sound of it opening, to the smell of the foam that rose from the opening, to the first taste of it (shouldn't the first beer in over 4 years be an epiphany of flavor?) to the buzz, which seemed like something I had improved upon with kratom, to the fact that, whatever I had been working on that night, went unfinished; and I probably got up in the middle of the night and shut the lights and the music off and saved whatever I had been writing, so that one more day without the publication of a chapter would go by...