Aug
26
August 26, 2006
Thank you so much for your wonderful comments and emails from my last entry. Thank you for – warning, whoop whoop, warning! Cheese factor at an all-time high! – helping me heal. Thank you, thank you for listening.
:::
I was sitting in Riley’s room last night with JB while JB read a couple bedtime books, and I noticed that while I am usually quite sincere with my storytelling and offer insipid “educational” extra commentary like “Is that a cow? You saw a cow on the farm today, didn’t you? Yes, you did, when you were in the backpack! Can you say cow? Coooowww”, JB takes a somewhat…different approach.
“The rooster says cockle-doodle-doo. And this is a hen. The hen says, Any cock’ll-dooo,” JB read. “And that’s a horse. He says, naaaayygetmeoutofEnumclaw.”
The next book, Where is Baby’s Bellybutton, involves lifting up various flaps to reveal where the item in question is. “Where is baby,” JB said. “What’s in the box? What’s in the box? Aww man, what’s in the booox?”
For the record, when both parents are laughing hysterically, it’s awful damn hard to get a baby to fall asleep.
JB has been operating on Stress Level Orange lately due to a work project that depending on any given moment oscillates between “giant clusterfuck” and “deathmarch to hell”. There are people on his team working even crazier hours than he is, but his work/life balance has definitely taken a plunge towards cardiac-arrest territory. He gets home, spends time with Riley and I, and once Riley goes to bed he’s back on the computer or phone dealing with a neverending series of crises until it’s midnight, his eyes look like two pissholes in the snow, and I shuffle in to tell him to come to bed goddamnit.
He was talking to me on Thursday about how much responsibility he has to get this project to completion, and how the various risk factors keep threatening the schedule and how shitty he would feel about letting his team down. I reminded him that sometimes circumstances are outside of our control, and there’s only so much you can do. “110% is a logistical impossibility,” I said. “Sometimes you have to have a streak of Fuck It to deal with stuff like this, so you don’t drive yourself crazy.”
“In fact,” I said slowly, a great and marvelous idea blooming, “What you need is a Fuck It bucket.”
If you’ve read much David Sedaris, maybe you remember his brother, “The Rooster” (second rooster reference in one journal entry! Go TEAM!) and his Fuck It bucket filled with candy. “When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it’, and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”
So on Friday I made JB a Fuck It bucket:
Contents of the Fuck It bucket include: mini KitKat bars, Snickers, Reese’s Cups, and a bunch of little plastic army dudes, which, if you’re feeling spicy, can be placed in various compromising positions in a clear violation of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. (“SIR YES SIR! This cadet wishes he could quit you.”)
The Fuck It bucket (technically the Fuck It Tupperware Container) is meant to be sitting on JB’s desk at work, so he and his coworkers can briefly escape their ongoing troubles via chocolate’s sweet, loving embrace; unfortunately, between now and Monday the bucket is in our kitchen, and I am finding many a good excuse to say eff it (in the boy’s presence anyway, lest I visit both the cuss jar and the Fuck It bucket in the same sentence) and eat myself some motherfucking candy.
Aug
24
August 24, 2006
First: a can of Budweiser, stolen from my grandparents’ refrigerator and consumed while hidden among sand dunes on the Lake Michigan shore. Maybe twenty years ago or more. It was metallic, cold, bitter, delicious.
In high school, forty-ounce bottles of cheap high-octane beer. Old English 800. “Old E”, we called it. Swilled and passed from hand to hand, the bottom of the bottle always warm and flat and tasting of someone else’s saliva. Bottles of wino wine: Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill.
Early twenties: six-packs of Henry Weinhard, the green bottles. Microbrews. In the winter, Snow Cap Ale (“Go to jail ale”). Sweet Riesling. Chardonnay. Red wine. A progression of the palate, of the minimum requirements.
Crown Royal and 7-UP. Beam and Coke. Bacardi Limon and Diet Coke. Absolut Mandarin and ginger ale. Beer. Beer. Pitchers. Pints. Imperial pints. Grey Goose. Dirty martinis. Shots. Tequila, lime, salt. Margaritas. On the rocks. Blended. Tanq-and-tonics. Double, please. Better make it a double.
Then: vodka, vodka, vodka. Because it’s easier to mask on your breath, because I could tolerate it straight. Blue Skyy bottles, clear Absolut bottles; later, plastic pint bottles of the cheapest gut-burning garbage. Hidden in drawers, in purse pockets, under cabinets, poured into unsuspicious containers.
At my worst I would get up in the morning and feel sickened through and through, I felt like I had an internal rot like a dying tree. Everything was dirty, everything was black and hateful, and I knew exactly what had caused it all and yet I would check the bottle levels, look and look again, because if there wasn’t enough I would have to get more, more, more. Get through the worst of the day by thinking of the bottle. Take the first drink and for the first time in hours the mental shouting quiets, the self-hatred is dialed down, the pounding headache starts to retreat.
Over and over. Get up and do it again. Drinking at work, while driving a car.
Sometimes I would get drunk and cry and try to write down why it wasn’t working and why I should remember, the next day, that it wasn’t worth the pain and the lying and the endless life-fuckery. I’d read my blurry scrawl the next day, take three Excedrin, drive to the liquor store.
It was like being with someone who beats you senseless every night, leaves you bloody and gasping, and waking up every day to kiss him hello. I wanted to stop. I wanted to drink until I disappeared. I wanted to physically gouge out the sickness from my body.
I saw no end. No possible end.
Antabuse. Therapy. Drugs. Threats. Nothing worked.
Then: a DUI. A horrible, expensive, shameful, life-altering legal mess. A night in jail. Fines. Court appearances. I can’t bear to describe it in detail.
Then: a pregnancy. The best thing that’s ever happened in my life.
I never drank when I was pregnant with Riley. That is probably not something to be particularly proud of, but I am.
I don’t drink today. I am only able to write about this now because it is at bay, it is a safe distance away. I feel strong. I feel I am on top of it. I don’t want to numb myself, I don’t want to re-visit that hell, I have so much to live for now. I want to remember every moment, I want to be clear and present.
There are long periods of time when I do not think about drinking at all. I spent years of my life chasing the next drink in my head, being eaten alive from hour to hour by something I could not control. I can’t begin to explain the freedom of not thinking about drinking.
I am scared to post this.
But I am telling you this because to tell the story is to accept its truth. To lay it out where it can be seen, to admit to this part of myself, and help diminish its power over me.
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