Well, it's New Year's Eve in the western hemisphere. I have been invited to a party up the street, which is set to start in 18 minutes. It will be my first New Year's Eve party in years. I have been invited to New Year's Eve parties almost every year in the past several years, but I was never in the mood to go, probably because I wasn't excited about sitting around with the same group of married people, and also because I just wasn't interested in celebrating the passage of time (whoever thought that would be a fun thing to celebrate, anyway?). Tonight, the party is in a different town and with a different group of people. Most of them are married, too, but I really like the people hosting the party, so I'm going to go.
One of the requirements, according to the woman of the house (who has been a close friend of mine for years) is that I must drink alcoholic beverages. Having been a bartender for several years in earlier times, I would normally have no problem with that; however, it has been fourteen months since I last drank any alcohol, and I am starting to enjoy life without it (not enough to actually quit forever, though).
Don't misunderstand me: I didn't stop drinking last year because I have a problem. I've never had a problem. I just quit because it was becoming too easy to rely on it while I was living the life of a single hermit on a desolate ranch in desolate Wyoming last year. There was absolutely nothing to do there but write on my computer (no internet), watch two pitiful (sickeningly pitiful) TV channels, and drink. To make matters worse, the alcohol was no longer having much of an effect on me because I had built up an immunity to it (but the headaches still arrived on time). That meant I was wasting my money.
So I stopped.
I promised myself that I would start drinking again after the passage of one year, or after a certain situation had been concluded, whichever came first. Well, I moved off of the ranch two months after I quit drinking, but the "situation" didn't conclude itself until this month -- eight f*****g months late! Being a somewhat stubborn person when it comes to keeping promises to myself, I continued to avoid alcohol after the original deadline had passed. I continued to wait for a year to go by. When the one-year anniversary finally arrived in early November, I was ready to open a bottle of cheap champagne that I had been saving for a year.
But I couldn't do it! Regrettably (no pun intended), I had started to enjoy life without alcohol. Drinking for me used to be like arriving home during a raging blizzard: It was a wonderfully warm and cozy escape from a miserable world. But one day I came home during another raging blizzard and found the place abandoned, with the electricity and heat turned off, with the windows busted out, and no one living there anymore.
That is what drinking had finally become for me. It no longer gave me sufficient shelter from the raging blizzard of life, no matter how many ounces I might drink (which is usually a lot less than the average social drinker's intake, but not always). It was very sad to think that I must endure this miserable blizzard for the rest of my life without being able to escape from it occasionally.
Some of you might be thinking that an abandoned house is still better than the blizzard itself. That may be true, but the rent still costs the same. Then, I rediscovered again what I had known before: The blizzard becomes tolerable when you don't have anything better to compare it to.
But not every day...
On some especially bad days I still wanted to run into that abandoned house, even though I knew it wouldn't afford me very much protection. I just had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't worth the effort anymore.
Well, now I am going to celebrate the end of that "situation." I now know that I can stop for any length of time that I set for myself. If I drink tonight, it's not a disaster. In fact, I am starting to look forward to it. I used to do some of my very best writing when I was inebriated. In fact, I will write a "drunken" entry when I come home this evening just to see if the "magic" is still there. :-)
As I end this entry (fifteen minutes after the start of the party), I will leave you with something I wrote on a solitary New Year's Eve ten years ago:
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"December 31, 1994, 11:55 PM: I am sitting here, doing my utmost not to give a crap that another meaningless click of the human clock has ticked in the universe of infinite time and space. I remember that midnight October 10, felt no different, nor, for that matter, did noon time, July 18. Why do people get carried away over a totally arbitrary invention that has no connection to reality whatsoever? If each of my years had been better than the previous year, then I might still play along with the game, as I used to (hoping to make it all better by wishing). But nothing has ever changed. Each year that I pretended to look forward to better things, nothing changed;even when I made an effort (I think the New Year came while I was in the middle of that last sentence, as my computer clock now says 12:01 a.m., January 1).
"P.S. When all seems as bad as stated above, then it is a good thing to have Beavis and Butt-Head to fall back on, thank garsh." :-) Sincerely yours, YouNameIt
