29 Going on Sober

A comedian struggles to tee-total for a year, to reset her approach to substances. She fails. A lot. But keeps trying anyways. Welcome to the Shit Show.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day Somethingty-four

I’m back! And kind of awesome. My name is Holly McKee-Clark and it’s been over a year since I last wrote about drinking and/or lack there of. Confession: I felt like a failure this time last year. I’d only truly managed to go 2 months, at the longest, without any cheating. But, although I stopped writing about it, I kept trying until my year was up. I tried, failed, tried harder, succeeded for a bit, failed again, tried anew, and so on.

The funny thing is that, once my year was over, I didn’t go crazy. I didn’t drink myself silly or finally get a rec card and buy LA clean of weed. All that changed was that I stopped feeling guilty. And, looking back, I don’t see any reason I should have ever felt guilty in the first place. Aside from breaking a promise to myself, everything I did was in the hopes of becoming a better person. And of understanding the person I am better.

And I do! I like myself the way I am now, best. My addictions don’t control me. I actually indulge a lot less than I did before, or even during, my year off. I don’t drink alone anymore, and I’m not sure exactly why or how this happened. I wasn’t some lonely drunk before, slurping last night’s wine from the same glass in the morning. But now, drinking seems special again. I want to save that funny feeling to share with other people. This sounds like I’m putting booze on a pedestal, but it’s the only way I can think to describe it. By myself, it’s a little bit like: What’s the point? 

I think I’ve come to respect my time better, too. I got SO. MUCH. DONE. in the last year. Because I wasn’t dealing with constant hangovers, even in small degrees. The times that I would cheat and wake up groggy, after only one glass of whiskey the night before, made me realize that I had been living in a state of constant hangover. It’s only when you haven’t been bitten by a dog in a while that a little nip looms apparent. 

I like myself better when I’m sober. Which I didn’t know before. Seems like a pretty obvious revelation; that’s just how it should be. I don’t care. I’ve had a vision. My wish came true. Now I’m going to ride off into the sunset, without fear of tumbling from my horse. Yes, I do have a wine skin. But I also have a much larger water canteen. And a lot of hard-working dwarves are waiting for me to bring the party at the end of this long-day’s ride.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 159: The Fun Bobby Syndrome

Please refer to my last post or episode 10 of season 2 of the 90′s sitcom “Friends.” You’ve heard of it? No? You see, it was a situation comedy television show about a group of six friends, some of them also family members, who live in a city and have troubles. Often they drink coffee. 

If you don’t know the episode, “Fun Bobby” is a fella Monica dates for a hot minute. In the opening scene, Bobby leaves the girls’ apartment and Rachel remarks that they went through 6 bottles of wine. The gang compares notes and their glasses only add up to 2 bottles, leaving them to suspect that Fun Bobby might be “fun for a reason.” Monica confronts him about it later and he agrees to try going sober, which results in what Chandler calls “Ridiculously Dull Bobby.” 

I’ve been feeling a little boring lately. Is that coming across? No? Well, you see, some people (namely: most, more relatedly namely: me) use alcohol or other delights to open themselves up in social situations, as it’s well documented that alcohol and other delights lower your Inhibition. Inhibition is the invisible adhesive of self-consciousness that holds your lips together, keeps your butt attached to your seat and glues your eyes to floor while you shuffle dance. It’s easy to forget that I’m a shy person when my Inhibition is continually being dissolved. It’s hard to feel boring when I’m used to feeling fun. 

I smoked over the weekend. I was at a festival and there was a party full of lovely, kind comedy folk that I have a ton in common with and with whom conversation should be totally easy. But I felt myself pulling inward, because many of them were still technically strangers, and I just wanted to relax. I took one hit. I was just going to get “a little high.” Any smoker knows that dangerous phrase. There’s never getting just a little high. And because of my newly earned low-low tolerance, one hit was all it took.

But did this turn me gregarious and loquacious, you ask? No! My shuffle dance did turn into an all out Kid ‘n Play House Party dance off, but my eyes were still glued to the floor. Because I can’t follow a conversation when I’m that blazed. And, more often than not, weed makes me want to be alone even more. But I did feel Fun. 

I don’t know what to do with this information or feeling. So I’ll stop boring you in this definitively TLDR post. I’ll keep trying to figure it out and report back.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

“Turns out Fun Bobby was fun for a reason.” -Monica, a Friend

[everythingbutterlaugh]

You keep it.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 130

Is anyone else’s microwave a super needy girlfriend? I've had a long, hard day and I’m hungry for dinner, so I pop a meal in the nuker and par-don me, if I need to go to the bathroom for longer than 3 + 1 minutes. I’m SORRY, Microwave, that I can’t tend to your demands within 60 seconds of your bequest that I retrieve my food from your tray. But I heard you the first time. You don’t need to keep bringing it up every minute, on the minute. I. Will. Get. To. It. Just. Get. Off. My. FUCKING. Back. For. A. Min--BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. Also, four BEEPs? That’s just passively aggressively unnecessary. Now you’re trying to start something. Well, bake up, Microwave, because I’M the one who starts things around here. Namely, you.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 72

Wow. Really didn't keep to that "post a day" promise, did I? 

It's been 50+ days-ish since my last post. I don't want to do the math. I'm not drinking; you do it. You do the math, you lucky, drinky sons-of-bitches you.

I'll follow up that grisly paragraph by saying it's really not been too bad. I'll follow up that follow-up by admitting that I haven't fully kept to my sobriety promise, either. Who ever thought going cold turkey on drugs and alcohol would be so hard?! It's not like there are hundreds of thousands of books and articles and organizations to help people go and stay sober or something. I must just be a pansy.

But in my continued efforts to keep myself honest, I've kept track of my cheatings, so now I guess I'll do the smallest amount of math and count them. Stand by.

Keep standing.

I said stand, not lean you lazy good-for-noth--11. 11 cheats. I'm batting 847 so take that Hugh Duffy.*

But I'm still trying. I'm accepting that I've ultimately already failed, but also realizing, in looking at my calendar for the last 2 plus months, how many days don't have a little 'd' for drink or 's' for smoke. How many nights would have usually slipped away re-watching seasons of Family Guy that I don't really find funny anymore but watch anyway because, "Hey, I'm too stoned to write and I need something to look at while I shove chips in my mouth." How many Saturday afternoons would have been wasted inside doing God-knows-nothing. How many mornings would've blazed past me because it hurt to open my eyes before 11:30a.m.

Now I read and write at night after work. I train (or better written, try to train) my dog on Saturday afternoons to not lose his shit when he sees another dog.** Lately, I can't sleep past 8a.m. 

So I'll keep trying. I may not be remembered in the Sobriety Hall of Fame, but at least I'll be able to, and want to, remember myself.

*I do not understand baseball inherently. At all. Use of online batting average calculator, looking up of batting average records since the beginning of time for impressive, deep cut baseball references (Hugh Duffy holds his record in 1894) and use of wikipedia for definition of what "batting 1,000" means were employed. Be impressed purely by my research.

**Why. Why Davey? He is exactly like you. To hate him is to hate yourself and, by the way you lavish mouth attention on your penis, I cannot believe you hate yourself.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 19

Beck's Non-Achoholic Beer has ALCOHOL in it. Did you know this? I did not know this and now feel like a total cheater. 

When I was in high school, and still Catholic, my parents and I all gave up meat for Lent. About a week in, my mom comes home to find me wrist-deep in a bag of beef jerky. She questioned my snack choice, in light of our sacrifice and I said, "What? Beef jerky doesn't have meat in it; you buy it in the chip aisle." "It has the word "BEEF" in the name!" she astutely responded.

It has the word "BEER" in the name. I thought I'd learned this lesson.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 14

"The metal hilts around the little beams are just casings around the plasma streams. It's all the same stream! Any Padawan knows that." 

-Stephen Colbert

Yay spare time.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 8

This is becoming harder. I had a freak-out last night, right before dinner. My sister and her boyfriend had made this big, beautiful meal and we were ten minutes from sitting down and I couldn't stop moving around. They were opening a bottle of wine and I couldn't find anything I wanted to drink that was interesting. So I awkwardly excused myself and ran to the store and bought all of their sparkling water. ALL of it. Lemon Perrier. Lime Perrier. Pink Grapefruit Perrier. Pomegranate San Pellegrino. All of the sparkling water. 

And then I was fine. Non-alcoholic drinks are boring!!!

[everythingbutterlaugh]

1 week down and 5 pounds gone. Although I'm sure some of it's water weight from the lack of my protective alcohol placenta. And maybe I weighed myself at the proper poop punctuations of the day... Maaaybe.

Still.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 6

Sooo, it's really only that first drink, huh? The first drink starts the landslide of thinking I want more drinks and thinking I'm not having fun if I'm not drinking.

Saturday I went out dancing all night at a bar. Stone sober. Sunday I sang karaoke all night at a bar. Stone sober. And both times, right when we got there and my friends all start ordering their delicious whiskeys and martinis and I get my ginger ale or coke, I felt.. left out. Not fun. Old, somehow.

But then I forgot about it. They drank. We all danced or sang or both. And the hours passed just as quickly as they usually do when I'm surrounded by lovely people doing fun things. I didn't care. 

So many times I've gone out and thought, "I'll just have one beer." And, after that one beer is gone, I think, "Well, I'm already drinking, what's the difference between one beer and three or four, really?" "If I stop drinking now, I'll stop having fun."

It's nice to be finding out that's not true.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 4

I just wrote a sketch at 2:00am. After getting home from a lovely friend's drunken birthday party (where I drank only water). After going to a lovely birthday dinner for me funded by a different lovely friend (where I drank only barley water and ginger beer).

This is not something that I could have accomplished last week, no matter how often I tried to erroneously convince myself that "I'll definitely still finish that bit of writing when I get home; I'll leave at 11, I swear."

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 3

I'm very bored with the drink selection at dinner now. Soda. Coffee. Tea. I've effectively transformed all of Los Angeles' varied and delicious restaurants into a small town funeral buffet. I might as well be choking down generic Hawaiian Punch and mourning Uncle Tom.

This is why I drink!

Drank.

Might drink again... 

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Sometimes it's just more convenient to look backwards for advice. Isn't that the same thing as going to your grandparents for wisdom? I'm putting sense blinders on today.

2 days in and I'm already smoking cigarettes.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

Day 1

I tried everything yesterday. I slept in. I went to the spa. For hours. I ate buttery Italian food. I had one last delicious jigger of Jameson and a beautiful glass of wine with dinner, but nothing hangover worthy, just celebration worthy. I even had my hippie-dippie best friend practice her new age, energy-modifying Access bar-running voodoo on me. All to try to ensure the first day of this venture would find me in a positive head-space. All to no avail because matters of the heart will broadside you every time. 

So... what am I supposed to do with all of these feelings now? Just feel them? In full effect?

No diggity. No doubt. 

[alcoholicartichoke]

"…visualize your own internal addict. Think of it as a separate ‘being’ that lives inside of you. When you don’t drink, it says, ‘Oh come on, just one.’ Your addict wants you all to itself. So when you talk about the bottles, or any other consequence of drinking, you are in effect, ‘telling on...

[everythingbutterlaugh]

I was just wondering to myself last night if what I'm about to undertake is a subconscious plot to feed my ego machine; if I'm writing a public diary to Kardashian myself. The idea that I might secretly be that mega-conceited made me want to barf on myself. But maybe I can blame the lime-light seeking on my addict, too ;). Thanks alcoholicartichoke.

[everythingbutterlaugh]

I Wish to Force an Epiphany

Disney movies start with an 'I-Wish' song. Snow White wished for her Prince to come. Belle wished for more than this provincial life. Anna wished for a chance. I wish for a vision. 

I drink a lot. Most days see anywhere from one to five or six drinks of varied flavors. And most days also see a bowl or two smoked. I'm a quiet and functioning addict, though. No bar fights, waking up in strangers' beds or alienating friends and family. But being prone to sneakiness scares me. I'm scared I'll wake up in 20 years, having ruined my brain and my body, because my addictions flew under everyone's radar, including my own.

I come from a family of alcoholics, so my rose-colored glasses have been left on the dresser; I know this won't be easy. But I have to do this; to know that I'm my best person when I'm stripped down to just me and my problems, and my ability to deal with them as just Holly.  

So here's the plan: my 29th birthday is November 18th, 2014. I'm going cold turkey for a year. 30 is when I'm supposed to officially be an adult, right? Deadlines have always been my friend. 

The blog is to keep me honest, to strip away the sneakiness factor I hold so dear. Every day gets an entry. I promise to make you laugh. Because I'm sure I'll need to, too.

And, lastly, as firstly, I wish for a vision. I wish for clarity. I throw my shiny new penny into the well of all good things and I'm wishing, I'm wishing for myself to love.