lovable lush

For the severaleth time in the last few years, I am 'back on the wagon."
This last fall was nowhere near the worst, though I woke up this morning with considerable cuts and bruises, but I realized where this was all heading today. I was taking the recycling out to the receptacle for my friend--a friend kind enough to loan me a couch to sleep on for the last month--in a pathetically small attempt to make up for my stumbling into the apartment at 2 am, waking her up, and scaring her when I loudly slipped and fell in the shower. As I was walking toward the big green can, I saw a familiar bald head and big toothed grin. It was my friend Mack, working for the city, putting the stickers on the cans--the stickers that indicate which items are recyclable etc. I hadn't seen Mack for a while. We used to work together washing dishes and pans in one of the dormitory cafeterias at the local university. For the last year, I had been working the early breakfasts, and he was scheduled on the late night shifts. We got to talking of course, and his wife called him on the phone. He told me how he was in trouble for something with her, and I told him that I was in the doghouse myself for last night. We laughed until Mack got real serious, and shared his own past problems with alcohol. He began with the question of whether or not I could believe it had been 15 years since he had a drink. He went on to tell how his simple drinking went from a few friendly beers and a joint to "crack cocaine" and three years of being homeless in Indianapolis. Mack spoke some of the wisest words that I've heard in a long time.

He put it to me straight and in plain, experienced words. He brought up the fact that he could tell three years ago when we met that I drank from the way I walked, talked, looked. He remembered seeing it then in the dishroom. He remembered seeing me laughing and talking to my girlfriend then--one who I could only remember and think of through a clung-to hatred until a few weeks ago. Mack looked at me and said, "You don't drink because you want to, you drink because you're running from that thing. When you're ready to get serious about stopping, it'll be when you're ready to face the thing that's got you drinking." You got to face it...face myself, I thought. It's about time I became a man and assumed some real responsibility. Mack got me seeing clear again today, and I thank him for that.

This post is the first in what I hope will be a daily blog. I say hope because I'm partially homeless right now, and my main access to internet is the public library, so I may miss days here and there--if I'm gone for a week, assume the worst. This is my sort of public outing and declaration of self-change, and it's been a long time coming. While my friend was yelling at me this morning, the one word that painfully stuck from everything she said was "disrespect." There are a lot of people that I have disrespected drunk and sober in the last twenty-three years. I apologize to all of you and myself as I have disrespected myself considerably through the bottle. Last, I'll apologize to you, for the messiness of this first post. I don't want to make excuses, but it was kind of a spur of the moment thing, and I'm still really hung over.

If you know me or randomly found this and think that I'm relatively interesting or worth listening to, please stay tuned and follow...and tell your friends, so I can actually get some readers.

Day 1 "You're only twenty-three now. You don't want to wake up tomorrow at thirty-three with nothing from the last ten years."