I knew a woman whose blog’s tagline was “Today is the day. I know I say that every day but really, today is the day!”
I’ve been saying it every day for longer than I can remember. Sometimes I ask it as a question . Is today the day? Precise verbiage does not matter. The substance of the sentiment is the same: Will this be the day I stop drinking? Will that moment, 1:35pm, as I sat on a curb next to a parking spot downing 4 lorazapams and a blood pressure pill, will that moment be the defining turning point, the moment things changed?
Instead I might nominate a moment inside the Market Fresh supermarket, where I’d been going to buy a warmup beer to consume, per my nightly routine of booze intake, before 2 Resins and then vodka. As I neared the place where the warmup beers were shelved I announced I’m not doing this. I turned and left, making no purchase, then looking for a place to sit where I could take the panic and blood pressure pills.
Hands were shaking, which in the past has caused me to throw those tiny lorazapam pills to the ground. I kept that under control but had trouble with the blood pressure pill. I was not certain I swallowed it or if I spit it back into the bottle. Not being present in the bottle suggested I had actually swallowed it but it did not feel like I did. There is no taste of that pill but it is big enough that I would expect to feel its entry into my throat.
Starting at 1:35 it is now 4:15. I feel calm and a little spacy, after walking back in a condition that might have put me in harm’s way if I had not been careful. Anxiety affects so much of my innards’ equilibrium, from tightness in the center of the chest to heartburn and strange tinglings through the body. They vanish after these pills kick and I stay sober.
I made it up to Ditmars, and beyond, to 19th Avenue. Wanted to see if the King Penny opened yet, or if it ever will. I want to document their rotary dial payphone in the back.
I’ll have to give away the vodka and beers. I don’t need them now that I quit, right? But the last time I “quit” lasted 2 days, and I felt better after resuming the booze. I should look into formal detox, though I heard the City does not do that anymore. The rates of patients who relapsed might as well have been 100%, and the program was deemed a waste.
One of the reasons liquor stores stayed open during quarantine was because the liquor lobby convinced state governors that forcing thousands of alcoholics to quit cold turkey would send many of them to the emergency room, already crowded to the gills with Covid patients. The alcoholics would overwhelm the already overwhelmed medical system.
Yet that decision is still cited at times by people trying to show how stupid the lockdown was, with liquor stores declared “essential” a barbershop not. There was more to that decision than liquor itself being essential. The medical effects of alcohol withdrawal can send any alcoholic to the ER.
I’ve also been told that alcohol withdrawal is, among all the other drugs you can do, the only one that can kill you. The withdrawal, mind you. Not the abuse itself. This was a profession social worker who would know her stuff, but if she’s right that means quitting heroine or K2 or even cigarettes won’t kill you but quitting alcohol can.
There is a scenario where quitting smoking could kill you, though. It happened to my father that he decided, at 70, that it was time to quit smoking. I guess he thought he was going to live forever.
But a respirational therapist warned him not to quit. If he quit smoking he’d qui coughing. If he quit coughing he’d quit expelling the mucous and gunk off his lungs, and he’d suffocate.
Dad thought this was quackery but he later corroborated with other sources, and I corroborated as well by finding numerous people across the years who say they or someone they knew got the exact same advice.
I’ve masturbated about as much as usual these days. I’m slowly, but confidently coming to the belief that I should feel no shame about it, and even do it in public under sanctioned circumstances. By public I don’t mean in the park or on a bus with unwilling spectators being grossed out.
I want to masturbate for others, and my preference would be for women, as I’ve done countless times over the phone.
I posted a bunch of my masturbation videos to a sex site somewhere, such that identifying that cock as mine should be impossible. All I get are crude comments from gay men. Women don’t look at that stuff, do they?
