Having flirted with moderation and failed miserably, I chose cold turkey, stone cold sober, radical recovery replete with regular meetings, rude awakenings, and spiritual reckonings. Before I could get here, the last bender began in beauty. I was at a gorgeous party, a gregarious festival, a green ritual, a grand ceremony. At first, the wine and whiskey made me sing and shout, but when day turned night and my soul soured, the final binge made me cringe and doubt.
Just as I can imagine with pain and power the day I quit, I remember the day (more than a decade earlier) that I decided to start drinking more vigorously with the subsequent lush-minded logic that fueled more sloppy choices: to consume alcohol socially or in solitude but always in vast quantity; to imbibe daily as others might pray or exercise; to precede multiple beers with a shot or more of whiskey and to follow the whiskey with glass upon glass of wine; to risk drinking and driving; to keep a flask in my satchel; to siphon wine into water bottles; to intentionally lose count, so I didn't have to lie, if asked, about how many shots, cans, bottles, or glasses I had chugged.
Oh how I remember―but I also choose to forget because forgetting is a friend of the alcoholic brain. Yes, some things were already blotted out while others were simply too embarrassing or shameful or stupid to even try to remember. Two decades of drinking culminated with several years of drunkenness, a lush litany of moonshine memories, blazing blackouts, intoxicated epiphanies, plastered strolls, salacious orgies, dangerous escapades, stupid stumbling, missed concerts, interminable excuses, determined denials, of passing out and passing the buck inside my sinister and soggy brain.
I didn't quit sooner because I didn't want to get sober. I liked to get drunk. The stereotype that sober people were boring, uptight, and self-righteous provided words, however wrong-headed, of warning. Teetotaling would be tottering on the edge of emotional terrorism, I told myself. What am I going to do? Go to AA? I was convinced that AA comprised a creepy religious cult where lonely road dogs and lonelier ex-wives huddled in church basements, smoked cigarettes, and waxed sentimental about their wilder days. How in the world could I end up in a boring old life like that, where every sentence or story would be preceded by the self-abominating phrase “I am an alcoholic”?
But here you find me: I am in recovery, and I do go to meetings. My story is my story, and while I may endorse AA, AA does not need my endorsement and by principle would never endorse me or many of the statements or arguments I might make in this blog. AA remains autonomous and focused in its work, seeks to protect the anonymity of its participants, and promotes no cause outside its core mission to aid and support the sober alcoholic.
By the grace of God and the power of a program, I may never drink again. But to be clean and clear of alcohol does not mean I have ceased to seek enlightened and sometimes heightened states of consciousness; now, I just hope to approach these possibilities more cautiously, more carefully, and by less toxic methods. I take the title of this blog―Ecstatic Sobriety―from an essay/pamphlet written and produced around 2003 by the CrimethInc. ex-Workers' Collective called Anarchy & Alcohol: Wasted Indeed; How the Fiends Came to Be Civilized; Addiction Culture: Strategies for Sobriety; Civilization and Booze. This elegant and ambitious treatise―aimed at the anti-authoritarian activist and punk rock communities―offers a lot that other audiences could appreciate and learn from, from sober rockers and ravers to reformers and radicals of every stripe. As I embark on a hopefully joyful jaunt of being without booze, the calls for an engaged sobriety speak to my activist soul.
The anonymous authors of the pamphlet describe a “false dichotomy between puritanical self-denial and life-loving, free-wheeling drinkers.” Ignorantly (and I thought innocently), many drunks describe their drinking as an expression of freedom and see anyone who might interfere with such intoxicated reveries as repressive tyrants. Such rationalization turns out to be a trick. The CrimethInc. writers explain it this way: “These partisans of Rebellious Drunkenness and advocates of Responsible Abstinence are loyal adversaries. The former need the latter to make their dismal rituals look like fun; the latter need the former to make their rigid austerity seem like common sense.” Rather than these, “ecstatic sobriety” is offered as a thoroughly inspired third way to battle both, “the dreariness of one and the bleariness of the other―false pleasure and false discretion alike.”
Similar sentiments can be found in The Cup of Fury by Upton Sinclair, a prolific writer most famous for The Jungle―his courageous, century-old indictment of the meat-packing industry. In Cup of Fury, Sinclair chronicles the unfortunate demise by drink of his friends and colleagues, some of the greatest writers of 20th century. A writer myself and a fierce admirer of party-monger journalists like Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs, I believed the notion (explained in The Thirsty Muse) that “a writer requires the liberating infusion of whiskey in order to reveal the nature of the world around him.” While I don't expect this proposition to linger long during my drier days, it sat central in the world of my wasted weeks. Sober all his life, Sinclair singes any such liquored-up lie. And who can deny the “other kinds of intoxication” he suggests, such as “looking at nature, reading great poetry, listening to music”? Like Sinclair, I now want to be “drunk without alcohol” and in love with the universe he describes as “one vast mystery story, fascinating beyond any power of words to tell.”
