Living as a functioning alcoholic is hard work; coming into work or back from lunch worried about my breath, or my outwardly apparent level of buzzedness, pouring just the right amounts at the right times in order to maintain that level.

Today, I'm grateful for having that burden lifted from me. I came into work sober and confident, and I'll come back from lunch the same way. My heart goes out to all of the other functioning addicts out there, at school or at work, fooling everyone (or maybe not everyone), week after week, year after year, until their bodies give out on them, or until they decide to fight a quiet battle for the first time or for the hundredth time, often alone.

I suspect the functioning folks outnumber the rock bottom addicts by a large ratio. The former rarely make a splash; they hide in plain sight among the rest of us.

Yeesh, glad you recognized this and are addressing it. I’m sure I’m an alcoholic by all the definitions but never went to work drunk, drunk at lunch. I’ve come in hungover but that’s it. I can also go days without drinking, haven’t had a drink since Friday.

Really glad for you.

Excellent start SJ!

Very well said. I was also a functioning alcoholic for a long - TOO lonnnggg - time albeit in an industry where being an addict is not only accepted but even encouraged (kitchens). There is still a fair bit of hiding though, putting on an image/mask, not speaking of those dreadful hangover moments where your body is physically crashing down (with anxiety levels obviously UP the f**king roof). GL friend, hang in there, the first sober year is tough and brings back some of those demons that the booze was keeping numb.

You may want to look into sports. Exercising can give you some of the same highs. And yep, tons of functioning or not so well functioning addicts

By the way, I forgot, did we already ban the user who voted less than five stars for this thread?

Thanks Da_Nit! I think you'll just have to keep an eye on the drinking as you get older, and especially once you hit middle age. It has a way of creeping up on people in that time of life.

Thanks fid!

Keep fighting the good fight, Dubnjoy000! I made it a little more than a year, once. And I think I expected some type of switch to flip around the anniversary, for whatever reason, and for everything to get instantly and notably easier, and of course it didn't.

Our culture seems to dwell on anniversaries, as if they're some sort of magical totems. I'm going into this run with more reasonable expectations, I hope.

Good advice, Fire. The most disappointing thing for me is that I'd gotten up to 40 pushups for the first time in my life, and then I gave those up in favor of drinking more. I'll try to start over again.

From doing the math, it looks like one person gave the thread 4 stars, which I love, honestly. It cracks me up.

Re: anniversaries (any annual event). It's just another day. There's nothing special about the Earth being in roughly the same place in its orbit.

Best of luck!

Thanks golddog!

I'm holding up well so far. I'm not suffering any physical effects, so by this point I doubt that there's anything waiting for me down the road, other than my own thought process which, as I know from long experience, is uniquely designed and tailored to defeat me.

Matchups are key in 1v1 sports and games, and your brain denying you something vs your brain wanting something is among the toughest matchups of all time.

Playing on the denying side, it helps for you to have or to make some additional goals, so that you can add one or more 'wanting something' items to your matchup stats, and in that way balance things out.

Currently, I'd like to start in on my book. A beginning came to me last night during a period of semi-wakefulness, and fortunately I remembered some of it. Had I actually written it down, I would have remembered all of it.

Here are the bones of it: Our radio deejay hero reads out a commercial spot for a product that I can't remember and will have to make up. The tag phrase is "All of this pleasure is coming for you."

Hero then reveals to his listeners that the advertisement was supposed to play as a pre-recorded commercial jingle, performed by a professional singing act. But upon previewing said jingle, hero discovered that the recording had been sabotaged by parties unknown, and these parties had substituted in the tag phrase "A crushing dystopia is coming for you."

Having caught on to that attempt, hero tells his listeners that he decided to go ahead and read the clean copy himself, with apologies towards the product manufacturer. Hero asks his listeners: if America is such a crushing dystopia, if we're all so unhappy with the way things are going, then why did we just recently re-elect our president to a third term with 89% of the vote?

He goes on in that vein for a few more lines, then he assures his listeners that the saboteurs will be caught and dealt with appropriately. Then hero plays a song.

We find out from hero's thoughts that the would-be sabotage was a false flag; a publicity stunt made up between the advertiser and the radio network. Hero's rant was merely dialog that he was given to read, while his fellow deejays all over the vast radio network were simultaneously reading the same copy to their listeners.

That's as far as hero's thinking goes, but the implication is that it doesn't matter if and when the press catches on to the ruse, because the radio network higher-ups know that enough listeners ignore or disregard the lying lamestream media that the stunt will have its desired effect: that of getting listeners to buy the advertised product out of a sense of outrage and/or patriotism.

So that might be fun.

The big obstacle atm is the research. I still have to find out how to deejay. I'm pretty sure that searching around on the Internet for a couple of hours will give me an idea, or maybe even open a connection with a helpful deejay who will answer some questions, once I know which questions to ask.

So that's my next goal: get started on that research.

If the above scenario seems far-fetched, check out the messaging from the Sinclair Network, owners of 193 local stations covering 40% of American households.

\

Apartment

My current place is not big, but it’s just the right size for me given my scant possessions. I’ve never been interested in owning a lot of things. I don’t like being obligated to clean stuff, or to replace it, or maintain it, or repair it, or upgrade it, or store it, or walk around it when I can’t store it, or worry about it being stolen.

All that is why I won't own a house. Even if I came into a substantial sum of money, I’d buy a nice condo instead. I’d give it a minimalist touch with the furniture and decorations, and I’d hire a cleaning service.

One advantage to owning a home; however, is that the property gives you a bit of a cushion between yourself and your neighbors.

This touches upon the matter of upstairs neighbors, so often the nemeses of apartment dwellers. Walls in apartment complexes can be thick or thin; sound-dampening or conducive to noise, but apartment ceilings always seem to be made from the thinnest gong metal and the tops of brand-new snare drums.



My upstairs neighbor is a young man who has recently taken up the ukulele, in much the same way as the Hindenburg took up passengers. Now, I’m not a musician, but I’ve heard music before, and if the thing he’s trying to play is actually not a viciously untuned ukulele, then it can only be the type of acoustic guitar that's been designed strictly for enhanced interrogations.

As an added treat, he sings. His apparent songs are invariably seven-minute-long emo catastrophes. And his voice: Imagine Biz Marquee trying to sing backup harmony on the Jar of Flies EP.

The above was an old man reference, I suppose. And here’s another: The young man upstairs makes the kind of sounds that make people throw their slippers at tomcats in the middle of the night.

Here’s the crazy thing: I think he’s actually streaming it. He’s streaming his awful music and singing…to someone out there on the Internet. In between songs, I can hear him talking to someone, and no one else is up there, and it sounds like he's making various attempts at between-songs banter.

Now who would listen to that? His stuff is really bad, but only merely bad, not bad enough to be so epically bad that it’s good, not like the Shaggs.



I’ve seen my neighbor a few times, and he’s a good-enough looking guy, so an uncharitable part of me posits that his streaming audience is just a handful of guys putting up with his sonic rubbish on the prospect that he might be an available twink, and subject to flattery, same as straight guys will do with admiring a profoundly untalented and good-looking girl streamer.

My issue in this spot is—and I’m not asking for advice here, I’m just venting—he’s not loud; the decibel level is fine, and it never approaches a level that would justify a noise complaint from me. He’s just unsparingly awful, and for a while he was carrying on for two or three hours a night. Me: I work hard all day; the last thing I want to come home to is several hours of out-of-tune emo ukulele caterwauling.

So last week, I started giving him an hour each night to get it out of his system, then after that point I started heckling him between songs. I felt that it was a fair compromise between doing nothing and making a frivolous noise complaint. I waited for a pause between songs, then I alternated between loudly and firmly stating “BOO!” and “YOU SUCK!”

So this week, he's kept his nightly practices down to less than an hour, and that’s been an improvement.

Awesome poast, SJ. After some runbad a couple of years ago I decided to never ever again settle for an apartment that's not located on the top floor.

I have been that upper floor guy at every condo I've been so far since I moved out of my parents. Actually I've been that upper floor guy at my parents house too, especially compared to my brother who's kinda too well behaved his whole life, but that's another story. In some condos they have complained about me at the upper and lower floor lol. F***ing nits. Currently at the top floor too so that can't happen, that idiot Canadian below me already gave me in writing that he's gonna call security on my next infraction though. Classic nits.
On a maybe related note I'm not fully sure what you were trying to express with your other poast, but just to let you know I am versed in the basics of turntabling, I mean these days there is so much automation that any monkey can do it, but I could do it even a little before and entertained some small crowds along the way so if you'd like to know any technical details for your book research feel free to PM

Thanks Sheep! When I moved here from LV in May, there was a housing crunch: not a single apartment available in a 30 mile (48km) radius. This current place opened up a few weeks later, and it's a 4 minute drive from work, and there's a farm with cows and goats to look at on the way in. No sheep, unfortunately, but you can't have everything.

Thanks Fire! I appreciate the offer. ATM I’m researching radio disc jockeys, and not the Steve Aoki type.

I’m hoping to start on a novel soon, and the main character is going to be an ex-con living in an alternate dystopian present, and his corporate probation algorithm has landed him a job as a radio disc jockey at a station that only plays the same top 10 hits over and over again.

I’ve started the research, and it’s been rough going so far, as most people on the Internet want to learn how to be Paul Van Dyk, and not Baxter and Scooter at the KISS 104 FM Morning Zoo, so I have to fight the search engines’ tendency to lead me to the cooler deejays.

Hopefully you'll settle on The Rocketship with Jocko Henderson.

Now there's a man who loves his job. His joy is apparent as soon as you hear his voice. I don't think hero likes his radio deejay job nearly as much; hero just happens to be suited for it.

This gives me an idea, though. I've only been searching for written articles, and deejays are not often writers. I'm much more likely to find what I need by looking through YouTube videos and Twitch feeds. If I'm lucky, the latter medium might show me any number of live broadcasts from inside of the booth.

This week, I'll look into this and report back here.

On a more personal note: I'm still on the waggie. This run's been fairly easy so far. My friend Gambelina has called a few times, offering many laughs and much encouragement, and that has been a big help. We've also come up with a new character type. Get this: a Pimp with a Heart of Gold. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't seen one of those yet. Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights came the closest with his Porn Producer with a Heart of Gold, but his character was only figuratively a pimp, after all.

I don't see our PWAHOG finding his way into this current book, but who knows? And if not, then maybe the next one...

As far as other support goes, well, my best friend lives an hour or so away. He was a serious problem drinker before hitting the wagon a few years back. My buddy's a complete Stoic about his recovery, though, and he doesn't like to talk shop. He tends to gently change the subject whenever I try to broach the issue--no matter if it's about his actual recovery or my various attempts at it over the years--so I get no real support on that end.

There's my immediate family members, but they tend to pride themselves in not having any black sheep in our little group--alcoholics of course falling into that verboten category. I've been instrumental in perpetuating that myth of familial superiority by being skilled at hiding my various drug and alcohol problems from them, year after year after year.

The last time I quit drinking for a long stretch, I tried to put out the hint that all may not have been well with me on the drinking front, but my family wasn't having any of that. They slammed down the denial shutters and treated it as a case of my being overly alarmist. Perhaps I was bored and wanted to stir up a little pathos: a sort of substance abuse Munchausen Syndrome.

They'd never seen any evidence of my problem, after all--never mind my DUI, lots of normies get just one of those and learn their lesson, as I certainly did, so case closed.

Admittedly, I wasn't terribly direct in my attempts to come out as a drunk to my family. In the end, it would have taken nothing short of a wrong-side up intervention session for me to get my point across. And I just don't have that in me. I'm an attention-shunner, not a seeker.

Of course, there's AA and other programs that offer support networks for folks on the wagon. I went to one AA meeting as a consequence of my DUI, and while I liked what they were doing, I didn't like it for me. Why this might be so is beyond the scope of this post. Maybe someday I'll untangle the bundle of insights and opinions I have on AA, and I'll get it down on paper--or cyberpaper I guess--but today is not that day.

Anyway, I'm glad Gambelina took the initiative to get in touch, and I'm also thankful for the very kind folks who've posted encouragement here. It's been a big help, and everything's been going well so far on this waggie.

Wasn’t the pimp from Hustle and Flow a PWAHOG?

Also Nero from Sons Of Anarchy was a good guy.

AA is like beer, many types and flavors, but some people just don't like it at all.

I haven’t seen either of those, but I’m not surprised. We’ve been writing stories for so long that there’s almost nothing good that hasn’t already been covered. The only thing a writer can hope is that his/her characters or storyline come alive enough to make people forget about the ones that have come before, as least for a little while.

Exactly. Another analogy is that AA is like the music of Elton John. It’s been around forever. I have a lot of respect for it. I know it’s good, but it’s not for me.

Not the Express Wagon




I was having a nice smooth and dry ride over the last month, one of the easiest times on the wagon in memory.

I made it through Thanksgiving with the help of some minor prestidigitation. "Nah I'll make my own drink", I said to my family, and I made two over the course of the night, with cran-raspberry, diet orange dry soda, plenty of ice, and tonic water (not a very good drink btw). Both times I grabbed the vodka and brought it over to my drink assembly area, then I left the booze part unpoured, with no one in my family the wiser.

After that, the first Sunday in December marked my well-to-do Aunt and Uncle's annual Christmas party, with its guaranteed open bar. The looming prospect of six hours spent sitting around a rented hall and chatting with a large tribe of family members, most of them occupying on the opposite end of the political spectrum from me, without getting a buzz on, left me sweating for an excuse not to go this year, and knowing that I would catch **** for it regardless, for being antisocial.

Then a fair number of them caught Covid, because they're not vaxxed, and the party was cancelled. I wish them all speedy and easy recoveries.

But I forgot about my Aunt and Uncle's generosity, which is very wide, boundary-wise. I forgot about the gift basket they send me every year, bless them.



I first tried Francis Ford Coppola's wine around 10 years ago, when he was just starting to make it, and it was good then. According to reviews I've seen since then, it's only gotten better.

I'm not throwing them out. I don't have anyone in mind to regift them to, so they're going down the hatch--not all in one night, mind you, but not over a long period of time, either.

I feel that tonight's audio-visual entertainment should match and somehow complement my fall from grace, so here that is...



When I'm done with the Coppolas I intend to climb back on the wagon and start over. I'll try to pull the same magic tricks for a non-alcoholic Christmas with the family, and after that I intend to stay home for New Years, then that's the holiday season wrapped up.

You don’t smoke anymore? How did you quit smoking? Did you ever have like one pack of smokes after a month and then quit the next day?

You should throw them out.

I don't like where this is heading.

Throw them out.

Been there, done that. Get rid of that ****.