A Social Drink
I noticed this weekend that I went from being a perfect gent to a bit of an arse. On Friday I was a moderate drinker & charming. On Saturday afternoon I was a ‘perfect gent’. From Saturday night onward (as the cumulative alcohol intake hit home) I became somewhat socailly inept, boorish & unelloquent.
There were moments where there was no talk, no dancing & so forth. In those moments I need to hold something in my hand & a drink it is. But it is self-defeating. I need to get comfortable in my own skin! Perhaps sometimes I just need to deal with awkward silences by staying awkward & not getting drunker.
It is another lesson on this road I am on.
But on the plus side I’m nowhere near as bad as I used to be.
Monday Itch
I’ve got the itch to drink.
It is because I drank Friday, Saturday & Sunday. I didn’t get drunk except Friday & even then it wasn’t a heavy drunk. Regardless I’ve got the itch.
Being cognizant of these patterns is one of the big gains of this blog. It is the awareness that keeps me ahead of the game. Helps me make the right choices.
I’ve got the itch but so what. I know how I got here & how’ll I’ll get out.
The Interaction of Everything
I am 32 years old. In the last year my world has shrunk around me. There are now few friends, no colleagues & few reasons to leave the house. I’m on a break from the world partly because I’m a bit of a drinker & partly because I’d had enough of interacting. I’ve talked a lot about the former but little about the latter.
There is a phenomenon I have christened ‘The Interaction of Everything’. To explain this I will present to you the life of Man A & Man B.
Man A lives in 1960’s London. He has a house in the inner city with all the amenities. A telephone, a black & white TV (without remote) & a radio. In the morning his post arrives & he reads a letter from his brother in Sydney. The news is a few weeks old of course but it is nice to hear from him as he only writes every 3 months or so. Man A would love to see him but it is a once in a lifetime trip.
Man A leaves for work & boards a tube. There is one advert on the way in for Bovril. He reads his paper which has only tight concise articles on Britain & Britain’s interests in the world. He reads this without great worry as he largely agrees with all that is written. Who doesn’t? Perhaps those hippies at the Isle of Wight festival but he doesn’t move in those circles.
Man A arrives at the office & works methodically preparing a report. Interruptions are seldom. For lunch he has a ham sandwich as usual. In the afternoon he makes one call to a supplier, presents his report (the summation of a weeks work) & makes a couple of phone calls.
In the evening he goes home & watches one of the three TV channels. He goes to bed & sleeps soundly.
Man B lives in modern London. He has a house in the inner city with all the amenities. A telephone, a multi-media TV, a DVD, a laptop, a mobile & a games console. In the morning he checks his email. Just yesterday his Sister in Law in Australia gave birth to a son & he is looking at the digital pics. A man in Nigeria with a small fortune wants to give it to him in exchange for a small fee of 10 grand and someone thinks he needs viagra. At that moment his download of the latest 50 Cent track completes. Then he checks flight costs to Oz. How much is an air ticket he thinks. Mind you he just went last year.
Man B leaves for work & boards a tube. On the way down the escalator there are adverts every half a meter. Each minute the surface on which they are plastered rotates & a new advert is visible. By the time he alights at the bottom he has seen 3 different ads on each of the 15 rotatable hoardings. Many of the ads are for TV programmes he can watch later or music he can download at work.
He reads his paper which has a main body & three pull out sections on specialist areas. There is a wealth of colour photos, exciting fonts & graphics. There are not only the facts but results of the straw poll conducted on the interactive zone of the website. A semi-serious celebrity passes comment on the issue. He focuses on an article about one of the many woes in the world & how they are his fault for living in a former colonial power in the wealthy west. He starts to feel guilty but isn’t really sure why. Then he reads about some other horror 2000 miles away & starts to feel depressed. Then a murder close to home & he feels fear. The train arrives at his destination & he’s read about 5% of your vast newspaper. He’d throw it in the bin but he’d feel guilty about the rainforest.
Man B arrives at the office & begins to clear his 50 emails. Interruptions are constant. Whether via email, mobile, landline or blackberry but hardly ever in person. He has time to react but none to act. For lunch he can choose from all the foods of the world. London is after all a very multicultural place. In the afternoon it is more of the same & work drags on late in the evening
In the evening he goes home & flicks through one of the three 300 channels. Nothing is on so he opts for some interactive gaming. When he goes to bed he is exhausted but he can’t sleep. It’s as if his brain refuses to stop thinking. It is waiting for stimulus.
This is the ‘Interaction of Everything’. The constant non solicited stimulus plus the incredible complexity of a globalised techno savvy world. A phenomenon which snowballs with each new change.
I have enjoyed the travel, the cuisine, the internet, the knowledge of the world & its issues but all at once & all the time is exhausting. Where is the peace & serenity that the brain requires for recovery from day to day grind?
A Bit of Normal Abnormalness
I’ve been going stir-crazy at home so I went out in Edinburgh on Saturday night. This is the first time I’ve had a proper night out in at-least 2 months. The bad news is I slipped up. I can’t remember the end of the party last night or how I got home. I broke a lot of my drinking rules.
I can actually pin-point the moment I lost control. I’d been drinking shandy (lager & lemonade) & talking a lot. But then in another bar I was offered a drink even though I already had one. So I caved and asked for a G & T. Hey presto I was double parking. A drink in each hand. After that the pace just quickened and I didn’t at any point think about stopping. I didn’t even count the number of drinks I’d had let alone the units.
Yet there are positives. I did actually follow a lot of rules. For example I refused all drinks in the early evening, all drinks before food, I drank shandy for the first few hours and I didn’t take a hair of the dog. And I did this all as if it was second nature!
So the next step is to make the rest of my rules habitual. I really need to how much I’m imbibing & how quickly. And crucially I need to be able to sit at a party during a pause in conversation and not reach for my bottle. To be uncomfortable without it acting as a trigger.
On another note. Did the alcohol actually enhance my evening? If there is a spectrum from sober to messy drunk I’d say booze ceases to be an enabler after the merry stage. About 3 pints. Up till then I was really enjoying the people & I think they were warming to me. I was actually being quite charming….shocker! After that they were still cool with me but I couldn’t think quick enough to amuse & entertain. Also I was chatting to this really intelligent interesting & attractive girl. Intelligence is just such a turn on for me. But while I did get a kiss I don’t have a phone number. And I would have if I’d been a bit more compus mentus at the party.
The crux is that I had a the best time when I was sober or merry & the rest was just ok.
Causality
I have this video in my favourites and every so often I watch it. I am in the process of changing jobs. I’m now self employed in a high risk industry. So it can be tough and at those points I often consider going back to my highly paid but unfulfilling ex-career.
There is a bit in all of us that cringes when we see guys like this but he is actually very good. If the viewer suspends his or her cynicism it makes sense. I’ve lived what he is saying & come out the other side so I can attest to that.
I watched it again today and it made me wonder whether 7 years of career hell had anything to do with my drinking habits. Well it certainly wasn’t the root of it. That started long before I began my career. But being unhappy doesn’t help keep alcohol under control. It can be used as an escape or a way to self destruct (to internalise your frustration).
In short happiness provides balance which is good for anyone who struggles to moderate or abstain.
The Phantom Bottle of Becks
It’s haunting me that damn green goblin in the fridge. Why haven’t I poured it down the sink? As a test I think.
Take right now for example. Work & emotional stress is swirling around my system. It 11pm so I can’t buy alcohol. If there was none in the house would it prove I could resist it. Nope. It’s there so I can train myself not to drink when I’m stressed. Get into a good habit.
I’ll drink it one day when there are no triggers.
Right now I’ll just play my guitar. Did I mention I bought a beautiful dark blue Yamaha. It has been 17 years since I played. I didn’t take to it back then but I’m coming on in leaps & bounds! Top 3 songs I want to play….when I am a guitar god:
- Cold War Kids – We used to Vacation
- Sufjan Stevens – Chicago
- Neil Young – The Needle & the Damage Done *
* May be replaced by a cheerier song when spring arrives
Intuitive vs Controlled
The delight of studying full time is the spiders web of knowledge you acquire. When reading material from one area suddenly a connection to another previously studied area becomes apparent. These areas may be intra or inter subject. Sometime they will even cross from arts to science. Like a wormhole connecting distant parts of the galaxy. Unfortunately work life never produced such fascinating connections. Though now I’ve left the corporate world I am beginning to get back in the swing of it. The skill it seems never leaves.
Today I was reading serialised exerts from ‘The Clintons at the White House’ by Sally Bedell. Ordinarily I’d just accept it at face value but the act of writing this blog has awakened that hunt for connections. Though now I’m seeing connectivity between personal experiences. Some of the quotes chimed with current thoughts on my social self.
Take this one about Bill’s legendary ability to connect with people:
“Above all he was intuitive. ‘He was capable of constant emotional scans of everyone in the room while he was thinking.’ Recalled one close Clinton associate. ‘He could recognise, quantify and calibrate a response to the emotional state of the person with him.’ “
This I cannot do. Though after reading this I can at-least visualise it. Why can he do this?
‘Another side of him was classic alpha male, supremely self confident and tough and capable of a fearsome temper’.
I think these two are connected (unlike the author). He could emotionally connect but was tough enough to deal with it if it went wrong. Being outgoing involves some risk after all.
The contrast is Hillary who once said:
‘Unthinking emotion is pitiful to me’
I can connect with people when I have something to accomplish. At work for example I had to have my team on-side. But if there is no clear goal I can’t do it.
So I am Hillary not Bill. Disturbing 
Resisting a Trigger
Last night I had my first real craving for alcohol since New Year. It stemmed from tiredness, boredom and the habit of Friday night drinking. There was only one beer in the fridge and the off licence was closed so it would be easy to moderate. Yet it would have been a mistake. There are three reasons:
- First & foremost I would be giving in to triggers. Very bad.
- I am trying to break old habits & routine. Drinking in the house on my own is one of them.
- It was after 11pm. I try not to drink close to bedtime as it ruins my sleep which somehow stimulates my drinking impulses the next day.
I woke up this morning after a solid 7 hours sleep feeling great. You can’t beat that.
