Happy Holidays

James Joyce, Araby

I read this short story every holiday season. It's magic is in its simplicity - the youthful vigor for life on those cold and quiet wintry evenings. It takes me back to those days when the Millwood boys would meet in the snow-dusted front yards of the neighborhood and play until our cheeks were rosy and snot dripped from our noses; those wintry evenings when the rest of Millwood hibernated indoors, chimneytops puffed steam into the frozen air, and the cries of the coyotes echoed from the backwoods. 

- 41 days sober

Hockey Night in Canada: a Fateful Night on the Road to Recovery

It was a February Saturday night in the dead of winter of 2012. The weather outside my single apartment - the one my girlfriend and I were supposed to share that year - echoed the current state of my soul: dark, cold, tree branches jagged and frozen. I was doing what I did that whole year, drinking beer in some vain attempt to wash away the past from my brain. Half drunk, I grabbed another beer from the fridge as the Hockey Night in Canada game ended and transitioned into the After Hours segment. That segment would change my life forever.

In that After Hours segment, Hockey Night in Canada streamed an interview with Brian McGrattan and Jordin Tootoo. Both recovering alcoholics, McGrattan and Tootoo candidly discussed their battles with alcoholism. As anyone who has dealt with the disease knows, that's exactly what it is: a battle. McGrattan's story hit me hard. It goes something like this: after yet another long bender, McGrattan woke up from a drunk in that depressed, withdrawal state; he knew, in one of those classic alcoholic moments, that things had gotten far off track somehow, that he needed some help; in tears, he called his mom, and said, once and for all, that he desperately needed some help. On some subconscious level, I knew that I was on that road.

Yet I was still in denial of my addiction at the time. I knew things were getting bad, but just not bad enough for me yet. I was transitioning into the alcoholic phase. In that phase when the fun still outweighs the non-fun. But the fun started to fade pretty quickly. Over the next several months, however, my own alcoholism began to spiral out of control into depths I never even imagined possible, quite rapidly.

It's a dark place, alcoholism. In one of his candid interviews, McGrattan states, "staying drunk for four or five days is not fun". By the Fall of 2012, that's where my alcoholism had taken me. Hiding bottles of vodka in my bedroom dresser, taking shots of liquor at 7 a.m. in the dark, skipping work and drinking out of a soda bottle at the park, going through withdrawals, ten-mile long walks in a withdrawal-induced haze, staying drunk for four days at a time: these were all places I encountered. They are dark places indeed. Alcoholics often get glimpses of the spiritual world that a non-addict would never have access to - they catch glimpses of hell itself. If that sounds bad, there are still things I am unable to admit, at least on a blog.

I went through a pretty vicious cycle. Sober for 3-4 weeks, feel better, forget the addiction, drink again, 3-4 day bender, withdrawal. This, I know now, is classic alcoholic behavior. But I was still in denial. Until the biggest bender of my life brought me to my knees. I remember quite distinctly during that bender that I watched the McGrattan-Tootoo Hockey Night in Canada video on repeat. I listened again and again to Brian McGrattan say "I needed to ask for help". I often woke up with earnest intentions of putting down the bottle during those seven days, only to find myself pouring more liquor hours later in an attempt to stave off withdrawal symptoms. I looked to that video for strength to ask for help, which it finally gave me. There was no denying it anymore.

Honesty is critical in recovery. As is evident from the last couple posts from this blog, I don't really care to deny what I've been battling, to anyone, anymore. And to be honest, I haven't been continuously sober since that day I finally asked for help. I went back out into the deep end, a couple times or so, and I learned what is common knowledge for alcoholics - that each relapse gets worse and worse. I had 3 and a half months of sobriety at one point before I threw that away. It brought me straight back to that glimpse of hell that I had witnessed before. I woke up one day and I had been drunk for 3 days: and it's moments like that when you really have no idea how you even got to that point.

 But today I have 30 days of sobriety, again, and I'm doing everything in my power to ensure that I never have to get that brief glimpse of hell ever again.

And I have Brian McGrattan and Hockey Night in Canada to thank for that, in a big way.

Groundhog Day

While watching the Michigan-Michigan State game at my brother's house today, I commented, after yet another pitiful three and out and another poor punt to midfield, "this is like groundhog day". Michigan was outplayed and outcoached by a superior Michigan State team today. I went home and felt the oncoming of the usual depression that is spurred by such a loss, an all too familiar feeling these days. I was OK during the game, I really was. I expected the loss. But afterwards, it felt like a new low in a relationship already studded with lows. Groundhog day indeed.

As always, of course, Michigan football seemed to symbolize my personal life. I'm on day 15 of sobriety, which, like Michigan football, feels like for the hundredth time. At this point I'm damn tired of talking about changing or saying I'm gonna change, it's time for me to do it. I've been to 15 AA meetings in those 15 days, and I'm determined to put this groundhog day to an end once and for all.

Maybe it's time to put the Michigan Football groundhog day to bed, too. For the first time, I really felt that maybe I have too much invested in a game that I cannot control. I'm not that young anymore, and depression induced by a game played by a bunch of college kids is starting to feel really immature. And the funny thing is, maybe sobriety and a more rational relationship with Michigan Football go hand in hand. In sobriety, you learn a lot about serenity - accepting the things you cannot change.

Enough saying things are going to change, though. It's just damn time to do. If nothing changes, nothing changes.

My Battle

Everywhere I look, it seems, people are doing what 25 year olds should be doing. Getting engaged. Buying houses. Graduating grad school. Maybe having kids. My ex girlfriend owns a house.

I can't help but feel left out. I am 25 years old, and the vision my 10 year old self had of me at this age is nowhere to be found.

I don't think anyone expects to be an alcoholic when they're 25. It's not fun. I don't know how I got here. I guess the warning signs had been there all along. I've spent the better part of the past year trying to stop drinking, or control my drinking, or whatever, and it hasn't worked. Because I'm an alcoholic.

It really doesn't seem fair. That my ex girlfriends are getting engaged. That my college roommates are getting promoted and moving into better apartments in Chicago and NYC. That my brother and his girlfriend are thinking about taking out a mortgage to buy a house. And I have to sit in a church basement at an AA meeting. It's not fair, at all. But it's my path in life.

Against everything my head told me to do, I looked at some of my ex girlfriends pictures today. I thought about where I was then. I thought about where she was then. I thought about where we were then. I thought, this must be the lowest point of my life. Then I drank. Again.

Most of my friends would have no idea how bad it's gotten. Alcohol has a grip on me, and it's disgusting how bad it is. I've had many Sundays when I've needed a beer or two just to get moving. I've had a few Mondays where I needed a drink or two before class. It comes with a depression that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. I'm not proud of any of it. I'm an alcoholic. It's not the life I wanted, but it's what I've been dealt.

I'm one relapse away from packing a suitcase and taking a flight to a rehab center. I don't plan on letting that happen. It's time to change my life.

It is a battle with a dark place in hell in front of me. But I plan on winning this battle.

A Rainy September Sunday

Oh, September. What a sad month. The leaves are all dying, the school buses rumble outside the front window to pick up kids who are forced to say farewell to a summer they will never get back, and the nights turn darker and darker earlier with each passing evening.

I started a new job this September in downtown Detroit. It's the first Autumn in basically my entire life that I haven't been headed back to school. I went to the season opener at Michigan Stadium. I went to one of my happy places, Plymouth Orchard and Cider Mill, and admired the horses and the roosters while enjoying an apple cider slush. I went to another one of my happy places, the Penn Theater, where I got to see Psycho with my mom, my brother, and his girlfriend. Today, I met my undefined-relationship-girlfriend's sister and her husband over Buddy's pizza at lunch. It all seems like I should be happy. But yet again, for another Fall season, I can't help but feel like I am just going through the motions. Happy has always been elusive for me.

I got up from the couch after a Lions victory hoping to go for a run - which always helps - only to glance out the window at the rain coming down on a Michigan September day. It seemed a very fitting end to this ho-hum September. I hung my head a bit and lay back down on the couch, throwing in probably my fourth wad of chewing tobacco of the day already. Maybe it was the rain. Maybe it was the Michigan bye week throwing my emotions off the rails.

I stared at the football on the television and couldn't help but feel pretty damn old. My first thought - inexplicably - was John Mellencamp and Jack and Diane.

Oh yeah, life goes on,

Long after the thrill, of living is gone. 

Songs that She Sang in the Shower

Jason Isbell

And in the car
Headed home
She asked if I had considered the prospect of living alone

With a stake 
Held to my eye
I had to summon the confidence needed to hear her goodbye
And another brief chapter without any answers blew by

And the songs that she sang in the shower
Are stuck in my head
Like Bring Out The Dead
Breakfast In Bed

And experience robs me of hope
That she’ll make it back home
So I’m stuck on my own
I’m stuck on my own

In a room
By myself
Looks like I’m here with a guy that I judge worse than anyone else

So I pace
And I pray
And I repeat the mantra’s that might keep me clean for the day

And the songs that she sang in the shower all ring in my ear
Like Wish You Were Here
How I wish you were here.

On the Summer of '13 Slipping Away

I've been keeping myself busy with my books and with my tapes

Every day's been much better since I've slowed my drinking pace

There's no swimming in the bottle it's just some place we all drown

I lost myself in sorrow, lost my confidence in doubt

- Gin Blossoms

It's that time of year again. The dog days of summer have set in. The back to school supplies are in at the grocery store and the college football previews are making their rounds before autumnal tailgates. There's a rustling of autumn winds, carrying with it a whispering breath of departed revelry.

I think back now on the summer almost past. I graduated law school. I embarked upon the first real relationship since the one that devastated me two summers ago. I put the past behind me. I read some good books, but no great ones (possibly the Hemingway biography and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel). I visited the schoolhouse in Canada and felt the cool waters of Lake Huron and the sandy beaches of Grand Bend, Ontario. I saw Back to the Future, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Goonies at the old Penn theater in downtown Plymouth. I went to the Toledo Zoo and Cedar Point in Ohio.  I was sober for virtually the entire summer, which is a long way away from where I was just a couple months prior. It was a good summer, but not a great one; not the '97 summer of innocence when the Wings won that first Cup, not the Indian summer in the Petoskey woods of '10, but also not the misery of last summer when memories past and whiskey hangovers haunted me.

I can't help but be nostalgic for the end of something. It's not just the end of summer for me. It's the end of something more. As a nine-to-five job awaits me in the Fall, it's the end of the hectic yet free lifestyle of a student. So I want to savor every moment of it. Make the best of it. The to-do list for the last couple weeks of summer:

• Tigers game. Hard to believe this one hasn't happened yet this summer, but two games are on the menu for the next week: Wed v. Minnesota and Tues. v. Oakland. Watching Miguel Cabrera alone has been a reason to remember this summer.
• Listen to a Tigers game on the radio in the backyard under the moonlight and with a bonfire. 
• Hike to Newburgh Lake. I used to go here on Monday's last summer when I was hungover, oftentimes avoiding work. It feels like something I need to do, go back and retrieve those memories long gone.
• Walk around Ann Arbor to all the places I lived during college. While depressed, I used to do this what felt like every Sunday while I lived in the apartment that I want to forget forever; it was by far the darkest period of my life. This is something else from my past, though, that I want to go back and retrieve, maybe change the way I remember those walks.
• Wish my baby sister off to college, at Michigan State no less.
• Get to Beaver Creek, the restaraunt my buddies and I have gone to over the summer, one last time. Though those dinners don't often seem like much, it's stuff like that you look back on and remember as the good times later on.
• Michigan football: Michigan Stadium August, 31st.
• Plymouth HS football v. Churchill, September, 13th. Friday Night Lights watching my cousin play to close out the summer.