Dry November: Day 3
Yesterday I took the easy way out. I don't mean that I drank, for I've done several things to ensure that this way would be hard, telling friends, for example, and committing to writing about it here. What I mean is that I was alone. For me, much as I love the taste of beer or the effects of spirits, I never had the strong temptation to go it alone, to drink alone. I might not be able to resist a good beer in the fridge, but as I rarely replenished them, this never became a habit. I know of people who get into the habit of a glass of wine while cooking, which becomes a bottle or two with dinner. I drew a line in the sand on this point, and only drank in the house on special occasions. Like if the hangover was truly the stuff of nightmares.
Partly this tendency comes from the nature of my drunkenness. After even one or two drinks I become more social. Some people think that I am always social; mostly they have not seen me sober. Alcohol makes me more outgoing. This is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing in the sense that I'm typically fairly friendly and easygoing when drinking, as well as in that I'm not tempted to get smashed alone. It is a curse in the sense that a social pint after work can wind up with me drinking and talking until all hours, derailing the best laid plans of my sober self. If I am alone (coming home for instance) and tipsy, I notice that I send more messages than I would otherwise; in my sobriety I am more flaky and reticent, less likely to respond, more likely to be grumpy.
So yesterday I wrote. I wrote about alcohol, and about The Clock and about Lola Montes, at home and at the Barbican Centre, which, except for the insufferable amplitude of the announcements outside the amphitheatre, and other quibbles too minor to enumerate here, is something like utopia for me. It is always a source of amusement that Ballard had these towers in mind for High Rise, since far from becoming a bastion of bourgeois navel-gazing exclusion, it is actually quite an open and productive space. The brutalist balustrades instil in me a kind of discipline, and I work well there, on whatever inconsequential resolutions to which I've resolved. On walking home past the Jugged Hare, I noticed that, although in the dwindling autumn dusk I become more attracted to the lights of pubs, it is not really a drink that I want from them. Pubs, like people, have qualities to recommend them beyond communal inebriation; much of what I think of as the joy of drinking comes from the space and the faces around me.
And so today, with coffees and cokes, I'll see close friends and brook their jokes about what I've become, how I used to be fun—though even in this I am joking. I'll be seeing my friend with whom I set out on this mission, and a few others, and they are supportive as all true friends are on resolutions of self-improvement.