Getting to sleep and staying there is almost always an adventure for me when I decide not to drink, but the last couple of days and nights have been exceptional. Wednesday I was up at about 8:30, still drunk, when I decided it would behoove me to act like I had to be somewhere. I thought, people all over the world now are waking up hung over, groggy, maybe even still drunk like me. But they have places to go, responsibilities to keep, and they go outside, they march to the subways and the buses and the unicorn-drawn chariots and they go do it.
That type of success, where the goal is mostly just to clear a paycheck, consists about 85% of simply showing up. The rest of it is simply about looking busy, pacing yourself, not making the co-workers look lazier than you, etc. That, as my mother and I used to joke, is The World of Work. Well, we didn’t talk about the showing up drunk thing, that’s all me.
So at 8:30am I purposefully went out into the world with two ideas in mind. One was to get myself feeling motivated to be in the world by actually being in it, walking to the subways among the hundreds of others doing the same. But I also had a bucket list item I wanted to at least explore: What would it be like to be drunk and stay drunk all fucking day, for 24 hours? I was not going to sit at a bar and swill beers and cocktails until I fell from the barstool. I was going to pace it, just to keep a steady buzz that might help negate the nagging feeling of indigestion and innardal tightness I’d experienced the few days before.
I can only think of twice in life where I had beer by noon, and both times it was just happenstance. Once was at a bar, where I intended to watch a football game that for some reason started at 12noon, not the usual 1pm kickoff. I was more focused on getting to the football game but it being a bar I ordered a beer without thinking about it. One sip of that shit and I winced, thinking “this isn’t right.” A similar incident occurred in college, but not at a bar. There were just beers around, it was the last week of senior year, and somehow a noontime beer seemed appropriate at the time.
So with those experiences now back in mind it should not surprise me that I had no will or desire to swill on any kind of booze before noon yesterday or the day before. I just couldn’t do it. Instead on Wednesday I puttered around Third Avenue in Manhattan, engaged in what endeavor I can hardly remember. I finally landed at a bar around 2:30, with the upside of that being that the conversation with the bartender was epic, and good fun. I was lightly buzzed on weakened bar draught IPA, and the pacing was such that by the time I left, after 2½ IPAs, I felt just fine. Tired as hell but fine.
I get into the most trouble with drinking when it comes to food. I forget to eat, or I experience some kind of digestive unrest that causes not to want to do that. I’ve always had a curious relationship with eating, one which I don’t think many others identify. Sometimes I can eat like it’s my job, other days I can barely lift a fork. Drinking does not contribute well to this imbalance, leading (I believe) to innardal conflict that makes food seem like a bother. Wednesday I basically ate nothing, save for a few pieces of chicken that I knew as soon as I bit into them were not good. They were not rancid but just badly cooked and tasted like dirt. But I ate a few chunks anyway and went to bed about 10:30, having passed out already and slept for a couple of hours while the chicken cooked.
Thursday I was wide awake at 5am, sitting at this desk writing a lengthy but still unfinished piece about LinkNYC. I wrote other things, did other things, and on balance managed to stay reasonably focused despite my soul’s ever-combustible position on the elemental plane of fire. I went out walking some, then a lot. I felt bad in ways I did not recognize, like something in my neck and head had burned to a twisted crisp. I always get through days like this, I kept saying. But this time things really did feel different.
I got into bed around 10pm, which is wicked early for me. Thinking I would play a video game to go to sleep, as I often do, I could barely hold the thing in my hand. I was out in minutes, but not altogether out. There were awakenings and thrashings, not unlike most nights I sleep unassisted by booze or pills. There were plenty of hypnic jerks, which always scare me in the instant they happen but I take it in stride as the following instant arrives. I try to lie still but I find myself in sometimes impossible contortions. The goal is to sleep through my hands, or rather to breath through my fingertips. That used to work when my mind was more settled and capable of such fundamental yoga-like moves. Jerks, occasional inexplicable screams from forgotten dreams, and even rare-for-me night sweats made this passage of hours move slowly.
I woke up, wide awake, about 2:30am. I had left a light on in the living room, causing me to think the sun had come up and that I had somehow slept through the night. Nothing doing. Not only was I annoying wide awake but I felt that bad chicken brewing side of me. I got up and hit the can and felt like I was shitting continuously for 25 minutes. I cannot have been that long but it felt like it. I felt exponentially better after this evacuation of inferior poultry, though not out of the woods yet. Just had to lie down and breath. I thought of doing some work at the computer but for some reason I had turned it off before going to bed. Booting up this piece of shit takes about 45 minutes these days.
So I went back to sleep, that attempt at serenity intruded upon by the smell of SOMEONE SMOKING POT, probably the hipsters downstairs. This must have been 4am. The smell of pot, increasingly as I get older, makes me nauseous. I tell this to pot smokers and they says that’s impossible. Shutup, I say (diplomatically). The pot smoke didn’t waft through here for very long, fortunately, but it was enough to make this endless night feel all the more endless.
I finally woke up, reasonably rested, around 9:30, scoring what I estimate to be about 5½ hours of sleep over an 11½ span. Dreams were expansive, and weirdly detailed. In particular I was in a compound of offices, shopping centers, and open spaces. It was either a school or a place of work. It’s like the spaces that are the stage for many of my dreams. This time there was a punk kid who reminded me of the totally over-the-top undercover cop from Hill Street Blues, a character I never much cared for or wanted to see more of. In the dream this was a fast-talking huckster who stole stuff from people using a combination of yelling at them and sleight of hand. He was a trained magician who turned his skills toward making people’s wallets disappear. From me he stole a package of strawberries, because I had nothing else worth his time.
My thinking today was to walk, and walk, and walk over the Ed Koch/Queensboro and onto infinity. I need a good, epic walk to make me tired as hell so I can sleep for real tonight. I guess I say this sort of thing all the time but I mean it, or some day I will mean it: no more pills, no more booze, no more living like a college kid.
Yeah, right. I’ll be back at the bar next week.
