CHAPTER:  LOVE

 

            “There are moments as an active alcoholic where you DO know, where in a flash of clarity you grasp that alcohol is the central problem, a kind of liquid glue that gums up all the internal gears and keeps you stuck”.

 

”Active alcoholics try and active alcoholics fail.  We make the promises and we really do try to stick with them and we keep ignoring the fact that we ca’t do it, keep rationalizing the third drink, or the fourth or fifth.  Just today.  Bad day.  I deserve a reward.  I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

 

“I read a book that mentioned a test people could take in order to determine whether or not they’re alcoholics.  The test involved setting limits; three drinks a day for sex months, no more, no less, and no variation no matter what the circumstances.  Someone dies, you still don’t have more than three.  You get fired form your job, just three.  Weddings, funerals, celebrations, disasters - it doesn’t matter.   I can’t remember how many times I took that test - dozens of times.  I also can’t remember consciously deciding to stray from the rule or to cheat, to have the fourth glass of wine, or to pour the three glasses in such enormous goblets that I might as well have had six.  I couldn’t do it.  Alcohol had become too important.  By the end it was th single most important relationship in my life.” 

 

“Yes, this is a love story.  It’s about saying good-bye to something you can’t fathom living without.  I loved the way drink made me feel, and I loved it’s special power of deflection, its ability to shift my focus away form my own awareness of self and onto something else, something less painful than my own feelings.  I loved the sounds of drink; the slide of a cork as it eased out of a wine bottle, the distinct glug-glug of booze pouring into a glass, the clatter of ice cubes in a tumbler.  I loved the rituals, the camaraderie of drinking with others, the warming, melting feelings of ease and courage it gave me.” 

 

“Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air.  It’s too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined.      Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you’re both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you’d die without it, and there is no simple reason why this happens, no single moment, no psychological even that pushes a heavy drinker across a concrete line into alcoholism.  It’s a slow, gradual, insidious, elusive becoming.”

  CHAPTER  - DOUBLE LIFE:

 

“ The phrase is “high-functioning alcoholic” .  Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so.”

 

“We’re often professionals - doctors and lawyers, teachers and politicians, artists and therapists and stockbrokers and architects - and part of what keeps us going part of what allows us to ignore the fact that we’re drunk every night and hung over every morning, is that we’re so very different from the popular definition of “real drunk”. 

 

“Alcoholic is a nasty word, several decades of education about the disease notwithstanding.  Say it out loud and chances are you still get the classic image of the falling-down booze-hound; an older person, usually male, staggering down the street and clutching a brown paper bag.  A pathetic image, hopeless and depraved.    The vast majority of us are in far earlier stages of the disease; we’re early and midstage alcoholics, and we function remarkably well in most aspects of our lives for many many years.”

 

“Sometimes, as a way of reminding myself how hidden the symptoms and effects of alcoholism can be, I’lll look around an AA meeting and tick off our collective accomplishments; that one was a vice-president at a large financial institution when he bottomed out.  That on was the head nurse in a cardiac intensive-care unit.  That one is his own architecture firm.  That one, his own economics-research company. 

These are utterly typical examples: strong, smart, capable people who kept drinking - who put off looking at the dozens of intangible ways alcohol was affecting their lives precisely because they were strong, smart, and capable.”  

 

“The knowledge that some people can have enough alcohol while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic’s body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic’s.  Once I started to drink, I simple did not know how or when to stop; the feeling of need kicked in, so pervasively that stopping didn’t feel like an option.    ...............the need is more than merely physical; it’s psychic and visceral and multilayered”.

  “Most alcoholics I know experience that hunger long before they pick up the first drink, that yearning for something, something outside the self that will provide relief and solace and well-being. “

 

”Every single alcoholic lives by the equation: “I know: Discomfort + Drink = No Discomfort.  The mathematics of self-transformation.”............Alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.  “

 

“This may be one of liquor’s most profound and universal appeals to the   

alcoholic: the way it generates a sense of connection to others, the way it numbs social anxiety and dilutes feelings of isolations, gives you a sense of access to the world.   You’re trapped in your own skin and thoughts; you drink; you are released, just like that.  One drink and the bridge - so elusive in the cold, nerve-jangled sensitivity of sobriety - appears, waiting only to be crossed.” 

 

“Almost by definition alcoholics are lousy at relationships.  We melt into them in that muddied, liquid way, rather tan marching into them with any real sense of strength or self-awareness.    Alcoholics are masters at deflecting blame; it’s one of the hallmarks of the personality, the way we explain our own feelings by attaching them t someone or something outside ourselves, the way we refuse, without even being aware it, to take responsibility for our own part in trouble relationships.”  

 

“The struggle to control intake - modify it, cut it back, deploy a hundreed different drinking strategies in the effort - is one of the most univeral hallmarks of alcoholic behavior.  We swear off hard liquer and resolve to stick to beer.  We develop new rules: we’ll never drink alone; we’ll never dink in the morning; we’ll never drink on the job; we’ll only drink on weekends, or after five o’clock; we’ll coat our stomachs with milk or olive oil before we go out drinking to keep ourselves from getting too drunk; we’ll have a glass of water for every glass of wine; we’ll do anything - anything - to show ourselves that we can, in fact, drink responsibly.”

 

“ Liquor creates a delusion.  It can make your life feel full of risk and adventure, sparkling and dynamic as a rough sea under sunlight.  A Single drink can make you feel unstoppable, masterful, capable of solving problems that overwhelmed you just five minutes before.  In fact, the opposite is true: drinking brings your life to a standstill, makes it static as a rock over time. "

 

Drinking: A Love Story (link to Amazon.com)