Day 275: I don't know what I can save you from

Midwinter in the north of Scotland - long, dark nights - and I have been getting interested in astronomy. I've been on a couple of trips, on a freezing hillside after sunset, or sheltering from the wind behind one of the standing stones in the neolithic circle, looking at the canopy of night sky over the low hills and black lochs. My astronomy stance: head back, mouth open, getting dizzy.

For a couple of nights I went out alone after midnight around the town, looking for shooting stars: the Geminid meteor shower. It was too cloudy to see any but I liked being out late in the cold, my clothes over my pyjamas, walking out to beyond the street lights, stunningly sober.

With my wellies heavy on the ground, I'm building a picture of where I am: on earth, travelling, and what the moon, sun, stars are doing out there. I'm thinking about how the seasons and the years happen and how my personal anatomy affects my experience of it; developing spacial awareness on an astronomical scale, pushing my brain out; learning new and pleasing information like that there are three stages of twilight: civil, nautical and astronomical. Nautical twilight ends when the sea is no longer distinguishable from the sky and navigation via the horizon at sea becomes impossible.

Or I hear about how peripheral vision is best for looking into the far distance, so sometimes when you look at an object directly it can disappear. And just why the stars appear to twinkle (it's because of atmospheric turbulence around the earth disturbing the travelling light). I am failing to resist the temptation to treat these things as metaphors.

I've always had four freckles in the shape of a parallelogram on my wrist and now I can see that they resemble the constellation Gemini.

Christmas time's tricky: the associations, the talk of parties. But I have to remember that alcohol wasn't working for me anymore. I remember being so drunk I was falling down, but feeling I'd barely scratched the surface, buying shots at the bar, huge emptiness. Recently I've been staying up late, listening to music on headphones, terrible self-critical accusations repeating in my head. I still hope I will look back on these times from a better place, made all the sweeter by what's gone before.

It's taking more slowly than I would have liked, for things to get better - but - as long as I don't screw it up - each day, each interaction with an old friend, is in the right direction. "I'd never really known you but I realised that the one you were before had changed in to somebody for who I wouldn't mind to put the kettle on".

Day 270: Every step

The morning after the storm, I walked along the shore looking for anything good that might have been washed up in the westerly gales: driftwood or treasure. I found one unusual piece of flotsam - a seal, on the other side of the fence from the sea, perhaps carried by a huge wave. A young straggler, blown off course.

I've washed up on this island again, eight and a half months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean like a pebble. I've got a fresh start but I'm not sure what to use it for. Back home, at the end of a rough year, in the winds that shaped me and where the sea salt left me raw. I've spent nights in the caravan at the farm, an exposed location on the Atlantic coast. In the storms the whole place shakes and the windows rattle but I'm safe in the glow of my laptop.

I've been trying to remember my last drink. It must have been the dregs of someone else's, picked up at the end of the night in a room above a pub in south London, as I stumbled around desperately. Then I got in a taxi I couldn't afford and when it got near my house, ran and hid from the driver in the walkways of a Bethnal Green estate, heart pounding. I don't do shameful, uncivillised, thrilling things like that anymore.

Day 209: You didn't know I had it in me

What happens when you stop drinking is that you stop drinking. The immediate consequences - memory blanks, embarrassment, wasted money - stop but you don't change into a new person. I'd partly hoped that I would.

At times I think that all I'm doing is not doing something - that I am doing nothing. At my core is an absence, I am defined by a lack. But if there isn't anything there why does it hurt so much?

It has been hard but not quite in the way I imagined. I am not having to pull myself away from off licence doors: it is more the devilish thoughts that flicker; that my life is over and I'll never have fun again, that if I'm not going to amount to anything I might as well drink.

I've been applying for jobs and have had a couple of interviews but am still on the dole. Unfortunately, what is probably the biggest achievement in my life looks like a gap in my CV.

As a present for reaching six months sober, my brother gave me a voucher with which I bought a new hat. I wore the hat on the day of my Grandad's funeral, holding my four-month-old nephew who has never seen me drunk.

Day 90: You pull back the curtains

It's a great day to be a Curlew. Today it is 90 days since I drank alcohol, today I graduated from rehab and, most importantly, today I finished reading Infinite Jest.

The beast, defeated.

So, today I finally got that T-shirt. As it was a special occasion, the circle of blue chairs was rearranged into a horseshoe facing me at the top and I read a Obama-style speech (well, a letter) I had written last night to the group and staff. I had thought I was going to cry but for once I didn't. I'm feeling strong and happy.

A new guy joined the programme, who has already been there once before and, to my joy, I found out that he is the artist that drew the picture of the dog with its tail on fire! Correcting me that it was in fact meant to be a wolf, he was happy to give me the drawing as a leaving gift and I plan to hang it on my wall as a reminder of these incredible 12 weeks. It speaks to me somehow.

On recent trips home I had spent the entire seven-hour ferry journey in the bar and had to be almost carried off the boat by kindly strangers. This time, I was able to stand out on deck as the ferry came into harbour after 11pm, feeling the wind and north sea spray on my skin and watching the sun set behind the islands. When Mum met me I could see the relief in her face.(Apologies for blurry photos.)

When I told a friend I was starting a blog he replied "how retro", but while I know it's a little bit 2003, I've loved typing all this spraff. But also, since I'm a ~blogger~ and therefore an egomaniac, and because I'm especially full of myself today, I am curious to know who's been reading. Leave a comment below!

This song is just perfect today. Here's a Spotify playlist of all the music on this blog.


INFINITE JEST: Pages 961 - THE END (Page 981 + 98 pages of endnotes)
- At times I had been reading this book for so long that I forgot what had happened earlier.
- In the very last passage we are given clues to the terrifying truth of what the fatal Entertainment truly is. Mirrors and surgical suture are involved.
- "A voice that sounded like his own brain-voice with an echo said to never try and pull a weight that exceeds you. Gately figured he might die. It wasn't calm and peaceful like alleged. It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you."

Day 88: It don't douse the flames

A few months ago, I knocked on a friend's door unannounced (I didn't have my phone) and, because I was sober, I was able to notice the look of panic that shot through him when he saw it was me. What state is she in this time? It was the first time that I realised that people - my friends - were scared of me.

But, in the last few weeks, I seem to be getting more invitations. My life - and my inbox - feels like it is filling up. The things I used to talk about doing when I was drunk now actually have a chance of happening. For years, I had plenty of insight into my problems but was somehow unable to take the action I needed to deal with them. Now, I am actually doing it, though, gradually building up good things rather than smashing it all down every weekend, or each night, lost in alcohol.

I had been dubious about going into treatment partly because I felt - as I heard some writer once say - that therapy is like "giving it away". His fuckedupness was his material and if it was ironed out, what would be left to write about? Also, I had the feeling that the details of my life should surely comprise a bestselling melodramatic novel rather than being told for free to an NHS counsellor? Nonsense, of course. I can hang on to as many of my flaws and self-mythologise away, but I was going to produce nothing of worth around me unless I stopped being stupidly drunk or cripplingly hungover all the time. And to achieve that I needed to do this.

Shit, I just used the AA speech pattern of "I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn't" that I was so scathing of somewhere in this entry. What has become of me?

"I just can't drink no more / cause it don't douse the flames"



INFINITE JEST: Pages 864-961
I've not got my copy of the book with me, but plenty to fill in here
- A few weeks ago I was reading in Soho Square when an American man pointed at the cover of the book and I asked me if I knew the title was from Shakespeare before launching, theatrically, into Hamlet's soliquoy: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"
- ARTWATCH: Apparently DFW considered using this chilling photo of Fritz Lang directing Metropolis for the cover: By coincidence, I've had a postcard of this on my wall for some time:

Day 77: Ideas, experiments, imagination

This track reminds me of driving at home in Scotland, accelerating over hills to huge views of low-lying islands and the sea. I'm going up to visit for the first time in more than a year this week - for a wedding - and am looking forward to seeing my parents, the farm and the open skies. Unfortunately, though, I've still not got around to getting my driving license back.

I've finished my ten weeks 'full time' at the treatment centre, and just have three and a half more days there. I was never confident I'd get here. The guys in the group have grown fond of me and joked that I should stay but (unlike previous peers) I am ready to go: my plans are starting to turn back to the real world (and away from this blog, also).

I'm coming around the idea that alcoholism is a form of mental illness (rather than just, like, a habit or a lack of control). Although I know that everything good that's happening in my life right now - re-gaining the trust of my family, suggestions of future writing work, the kind of confident step I've had the last few days - is reliant on me staying sober; just now, as I cycled over the bridge across the Eastway in the sun knowing I had a free afternoon, I had the thought that a couple of beers would not only be a nice idea but would be the only thing that would give me satisfaction right now. Although I don't think I am crazy in general, thoughts like this are literally insane. I think. I have to stay vigilant.

But I don't always 100% hate the fact that I'm an alcoholic. This is my story. My drinking - and the fact that I still smoke - means that it's hard for me to ever take the moral highground. When I see someone else being self-destructive or inconsiderate or short-sighted, I can understand. I think this is healthy.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 808-864
- DFW is a master of conversations where two characters are speaking a cross purposes - each carrying on with their own stories, only half responding to what the other is say. Like real life.
- An exciting passage where a military-style interrogation of Molly Notkin reveals a lot of missing details: about Madame Psychosis, the circumstances of Himself's death and Infinite Jest the entertainment.
- In the book, a lot of the story has been told in retrospect through conversations and interviews (notable exception to this Don Gately's fight with the Nucks).
- Some of the book's first pop-cultural references - a bedridden Gately remembering Seinfeld, Ren and Stimpy, and Cheers.
- Recovery joke: "In Boston AA, newcomer seducing is called 13th Stepping" HAHAHA.
- Hal's a week off the one-hitters: "I'd felt for almost a week as if I needed to cry for some reason but the tears were somehow stopping just milimetres behind my eyes and staying there."

Day 72: I grew the bones of a fighter while you were sleeping

It's embarrassing but I've been doing a lot of crying lately. I hope that, rather than this simply being self-pity and wallowing, it's a symptom of growing - the pain of forcing new paths through my synapses instead of turning to alcohol for reward, escape, motivation as I have done for years and years.

I'm also trying to be aware that not everything is about me + drink (or me + no drink). People like to create narratives for themselves, mark a turning point in the plot of their lives after which everything is different - whether that be quitting booze, dying your hair red (I watched six episodes of My So-Called Life last night), finding Jesus or being trapped in a freezer for 48 hours. I once visited my ex and he told me that he'd "barely eaten eggs since we broke up". I was glad that he was using the same unit of time as me.

[I know this song initially sounds really hateable but it turns out I love it]


INFINITE JEST: 795-808

Day 71: Bright lights / Cat fights / Leave me cold

In each meeting someone mentions something they used to do that I did too: trying to hide the sound of the ring pull while on the phone, forcing the drink down despite gagging, going to the off licence and buying two cans when it has never - on hundreds of occasions - been just two.

I'm sorry if the things I say on this blog are alarming. My mood is unstable but today - after going out last night to a cocktail bar and having an ok time - I'm bright and clear and happy to be sober (and not hungover).


INFINITE JEST: Pages 787-795
- The book's dead exciting at the moment and I've lots to say but my cyber cafe time limit will not allow just now.

Day 70: A couple of drunken nights rolling on the floor, is just the kind of mess I'm looking for

This is one of my Dad's favourite songs and I heard it a lot as a kid. On reflection, the lyrics might not have been the best influence...

Thirteen minutes left in the internet cafe...

I feel like I was a girl on a farm on an island and I've woken up and it's 12 years later and for some reason I'm sitting in AA meetings in London... sitting in Salvation Army centres and church halls with bunches of misfits, drinking tea from chipped mugs, listening to tales of people shitting the bed and laughing our heads off.

It didn't matter to me so much when I was drinking but now I am feeling the distance between me and my family. It would be nice to have somewhere safe to go and flop at the weekends - but my parents live 800 miles away. My brother's baby was due yesterday and I'm keeping my phone close. I am so excited about my first nephew and hope he never sees me drunk or is in any way affected by the fallout from my drinking.

Last night - Friday night - I was in my pyjamas at 9pm then suddenly felt restless and frustrated - playing bangin tunes and smoking tensely out of the window of my bedsit. Is this my life now?



INFINITE JEST: Pages 774-787
- heavy endnotes
- "The odd stunned quality of customarily crowded places at empty times".
- "low-risk trancendentalism".

Day 68: You're just a sinner I am told

There's a childlike felt-tip drawing on the wall by one of the previous clients, and I've only just realised that it is of a dog with its tail on fire.

Just Riding It Like A Soldier today.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 752-774
- ♥ Mario

Day 67: You see me on the bridge alot / But I never leapt over

Sometimes during the days of relentless therapy groups, I look around and think there's been a terrible mistake: That I've been put in the bottom class with the naughtiest boys and there's no way I can talk or spell my way out of it. But at other times, the things that happen in that circle of chairs move me so deeply, I think this is the best and most appropriate thing I have ever done.

We have weekly written work to hand in, and in the first three or four weeks had to write at least a paragraph (including ~feelings~) on thirty nine (39) examples from our past of the (mainly terrible) consequences of our drinking / drug use. Yesterday one of the guys - in his 50s, a former heroin user and dealer - was reading out his 'steps' and talked about his childhood love of sailing, fishing and "open seas"; and his once-tender relationship with the wife who divorced him in the 80s. Everyone in the circle, including the counsellors who must have seen so much, and men who have spent almost half their life in jail, were fighting back tears - at wasted lives and thrawted ambitions and broken hearts.

He said it was the first time he had thought about these things in years and was surprised to find emotions still there after decades of being avoided with drugs. Again, I felt glad that I have got here while I am still relatively young.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 725-752
- Wheelchair Assassin Marathe is in the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House! Two strands of the book coming together! Will we see more of this as I enter the final quarter of the book? Will it all start to make sense?

Day 65: I'm never gonna lose any of my old letters

My home broadband is still not working so it's another quick message from the cyber cafe. I just had to choose whether to spend my last pennies on food or internet...

So I don't really have time to tell you about our visit to the City Farm where the sight of a former crackhead sitting calmly on a rock coaxing three lambs to join him made us all smile, and where another of my addicts chums showed me how the fourth knuckle on his right fist is flattened from punching a cow.

Neither will I have time to tell you how I took some paracetamol for a headache today and remembered that, as I used to be constantly hungover, I was popping them every four hours all day. I used to feel that bad all the time.

Or the gossip I was told that, for several days before he got discharged, one of my peers was somehow passing off urine not his own in the twice-weekly piss test.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 679-725
- Drug dealing described as "operating a pharmaceutical company without a licence".
- Randy Lenz's cocaine paranoia of being followed by helicopters "that flew too high to see, hovering, the tiny chop of their rotors disguised as your own drumming heart".

Day 63: Lights

Yesterday I went to visit a couple of guys who have left the treatment programme (one finished the twelve weeks, one was asked to leave after eight), over in the 'supported housing' block where they live together with twenty or so other men with addiction problems. It was a strange place: the ensuite rooms, secure entry system and smell of stale smoke making it somewhere between a hotel, prison and student halls-of-residence.

Unexpectedly, a guy came into the communal kitchen who was discharged from the programme in my second week, following a relapse. The deterioration in his appearance was shocking. He had lost weight and teeth, and his hands and face were covered in sores which the others later told me were cigarette burns. He told me that, after leaving, he went on a bender culminating in a five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Mile End Hospital.

He said he was back in AA meetings, trying to stay off the drink and feeling "better", but his wild eyes told a different story. It's a terrifying place back out there.

P.S. I was two months sober yesterday!



INFINITE JEST: Pages 666-679

Day 61: I've been getting away with it all my life

Spun out this afternoon. It's like the workings of the city and my mind have been exposed and it makes even less sense that when they were concealed. Layers of complexity multiply and I can't hang on. I cycle around the roundabout under Canary Wharf where there are trade entrances to glossy office blocks above and waiters from the Chinese restaurant smoke and I breathe in trapped traffic fumes and plastic bags. Through Hackney Wick, where on one side of the road a storage facility is packed with Rubiks Cubes of people's possessions and on the other side a newly built, empty apartment block is ready for them to move it all into.

I'm sometimes scared about what this treatment programme is turning me into. Endlessly self-absorbed and self-doubting, I'm shocked to find myself speaking platitudes that used to make my brain recoil. Is my moral compass wonky? We listen to people share about terrible behaviour and crimes they did under the influence, and praise them for being "honest". I hang out all day with jailbirds, junkies and crackheads and nod when one tells me proudly that his family is so well connected in Bangladesh that his brother literally got away with murder. I just lied when my landlord asked me if I had lost my job.

My thoughts won't stop today and I just want to escape myself. I want to eat my own teeth, crunched down with Coca Cola until I'm sick. I want to be put into a medically induced coma. I want the future now. I want to care for other people and not live on my own anymore. I want nothing more than to stay sober but I want a fucking drink.

But although I'm half-crazy right now some things are good. I found out yesterday that I neither had any of the Hepatitises nor any of the STDs. I hadn't thought I was worried about it until I burst into tears of relief when the nurse showed me the blood test results. This afternoon in the acupuncture session my ears kept spitting out the needles which made me laugh. And I love my bike.

My time's running out in the internet cafe. Bye x



INFINITE JEST: Pages 633-666

Day 59: Turn the page

I'm in a cafe because - disaster - my home internet is down, but I thought I'd quickly share some discoveries:

1. Mornings can be beautiful. I'll not go as far as to say that I'm a 'morning person' or to start eating breakfast but lately I have been at my calmest and happiest at the beginning of the day. The terror on waking - scanning my memory (/outbox) for the bad thing I did drunk the night before - is beginning to fade, and I have energy and optimism to face the day. Similarly, I've discovered it is possible for weekends to leave one rested rather than destroyed.

2. Steady progress can build to create a deeper satisfaction than dramatic rushes. Like many addicts, I have been used to instant gratification and I've also relied on bursts of hard work to get through. This is not the only way. Relationships are built on calm communication rather than drunk declarations.

3. I'm practically the Dalai Lama innit ^^^

4. I keep getting deja vu. Any theories on why?



INFINITE JEST: Pages 624-633, read in the Asda cafe with a view of the Asda carpark. remind me not to go in here again.

Day 58: These are just a couple of my cravings

I've given up putting on make-up in the morning. No matter how good the mood I am in, I end up crying it off by lunchtime. As I am still the only woman on the programme (and we've barely seen any tears from the guys, just some sniffs from time to time), there has been talk of me "expressing the feelings of the group". And let me tell you, being a conduit for the repressed emotions of seven raw and clucking addicts is no walk in the park. So I am exhausted, as usual.

As you can see, I've not written on here for a wee while. Blogger was down for a couple of days and then, on Saturday, it was my 30th birthday. I was a bit stressed about my birthday lunch - would anyone turn up, would me sober be unbearably awkward and boring etc - and on Friday morning, cycling into the rehab centre, I had a strong urge to throw everything in: quit the programme, cancel my friends and go away into some secret corner, alone with some bottles. I felt that the idea of me stopping drinking was laughable to impossible, and if I smiled and nodded to people on my birthday that I was happy and doing well I would be lying, because all I want to do is get pissed.

But I did not act on these thoughts and instead 'shared' them with my counsellor and in group therapy and - this is so amazing, truly incredible to me - I did not crave a drink all weekend. Despite my skepticism, it seems like something is working. I felt fairly relaxed with my friends on my birthday and so pleased that I was able to start a new decade sober, smiling, with no tears or drama. I've drank more than one person's quota in my life so far, and the second half of my twenties has been pretty miserable. I am looking forward with hope.

However, as I should have expected, the demons are not banished. Last night the drinking dreams - mixed up with pain, loneliness and insecurities from last few years - came again. To my horror, I am not perfectly cured quite yet.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 614-625
- I woke up at my friend's place on Sunday morning and felt something was missing - not my youth, but my copy of Infinite Jest (which I'd left at home). For the last two months I've carried it in my bag, kept it by my bed and am comforted by its weight and progressing bookmark. I was up early (no hangover!) and picked up a book (on the history of hip hop) from her shelf and was tearing though it before the others got up. Not only does it seem I've developed pretty serious a daily reading habit, but also other books feel easy to handle compared to DFW's elegant complexity. I think this is good.

Day 53: Lucky

For the past couple of months I have peed into one of these twice a week. Neat huh?
"Fully Integrated and sealed drug test cup with built in 5 panel drug test for Cannabis, Cocaine, Opiates, Amphetamine and Methamphetamine Each drug testing unit also incorporates a temperature strip(checks urine is "body temperature")"

I've also given regular breathalyser tests and, although I know I have not drank, I am always somehow relieved when the reading beeps up ZERO.

Perhaps I have been assimilated into AA's cult of 'gratitude' but I am feeling quite lucky to be where I am. I have the time and space for six more weeks to be selfish: to really find things out about myself and create a stable foundation for the future. I am not paying to be on this programme, and outside of myself I have few pressures and responsibilities. I intend to make the most of it.

And, apart the pain of giving up alcohol and examining all the horrible things it has done to me, I'm having some fun. I am lucky to be having a go at (/indulging in) 'treatment' and meeting all these new people. I would not have joined such a loopy and unpredictable group anywhere else. It is opening my eyes and making me reconfigure my priorities. For example, working with people who can barely read and write - but who often express themselves with eloquence that hurts my heart - makes my pedantic concerns over stuff like grammar seem petty and obscure. Hearing about life in prisons, in hospitals, in travelling communities, in large families, in Russia and in Stepney Green shows me spheres of experience orbiting far away from media-saturated graduates bitching on twitter.

I don't know. Something. I don't know. Nothing.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 580-614 (much read in the waiting room for the walk-in doctors surgery).
- Enjoyed the (typically) detailed account of the routine and bureaucracy of Don Gately's staff job at the Recovery House: "Residents on meds respond to the sound of the meds locker the way a cat will respond to the sound of a can-opener. They just like materialize."
- And Mario's view of adult life: "It's like some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy".
- And when Hal is sad: "This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important".
- This is great writing, I think; when DFW puts into words something I have often felt but never even known that I've felt, until I read it here and go crazy with the biro underlining. Wow.

Day 51: My mind is like a plastic bag

- On Saturday night, after an excellent afternoon with friends + kids on the other side of London, I spent two or three hours sitting in my room in a red party dress and red lipstick having an internal debate about whether to go to a big 30th birthday party (theme: "the decadent and the damned") in a club in Shoreditch. At 1am it started raining and made my decision for me, but I think I had got to the point of realising that turning up late, dramatically and alone was too much like my 'old behaviour' (what I'm trying to recognize and eliminate) - just minus the booze. I was exhausted anyway and didn't think the birthday girls would miss me. My re-entry to society should be more structured and sane.

- One of the peers turned up wearing a Jack Daniels Tshirt and was, predictably, told not to wear it again - v inappropriate. He hadn't realised. I told him (a recovering junkie) that I'd wear my heroin Tshirt tomorrow.

- A dream about a glass of red wine. It was so delicious and I thought I could get away with drinking it without anyone knowing. I woke guilty and relieved. My drinking is truly fucked.

- Another person was discharged today. Not for a relapse (as far as I know), but for not 'engaging' in the programme (eg. not talking in groups, turning up late etc). He had already been given a written warning and after staying silent in group therapy this morning, was shown the door. So, out of my original ten: two completed, one discharged, one left, five relapsed and ME (I am now the 'oldest' member of the group and still the only woman). Wish me luck.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 536-580
- Randy Lenz's hobby of 'demapping' rats and cats (ie killing, 'resolving')
- Endnotes with endnotes
- And on page 566, a sex scene (Orin Incandenza & one of his 'subjects'). At last! DFW, I didn't think you had it in you.

Day 47: Air á Danser

- My favourite didn't come back to the treatment centre today. He smoked some heroin at the weekend and discharged himself yesterday.

- On my way home I sat on a bench by the canal, reading Infinite Jest. Two lads with dreadlocks and long shorts were setting up a tightrope between two trees near the railway bridge. They called to me asking if I wanted a go, so I ran over and slipped off my shoes. "You could hold onto the tree or me, but the best thing to do is to use the power from your own push up to balance yourself," he told me. My legs quivered uncontrollably sending vibrations along rope and, as Central Line trains thundered above, I tried to keep my back straight and my eyes on the horizon. I fell almost immediately.

- I keep thinking about a Bloody Mary, a drink I rarely drunk. A Bloody Mary with plenty of vodka through a straw sitting outside a cafe by myself. But the thing is with cravings is that they pass: An hour later you wonder what that was all about.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 520-536
- More on the veil-wearing Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (a kind of AA parody): "U.H.I.D allows members to be open about their essential need for concealment... they teach you how to accept your nonacceptance."

Day 46: When will you silence your hounds?

We were given a talk on nutrition yesterday and I enjoyed it so much. It was refreshing to be looking at something practical rather than the relentless questioning about feelings: it pleased me to be learning stuff. It came at the right time too, because after six weeks of running on Coca Cola and cigarettes, I had just decided to cut down and get a bit of balance in my diet. The dietitian, however, told me not to stop the Coke immediately as I might go a bit bonkers - so I'm going to try to stick to just one or two small bottles a day rather than, er, two or three litres.

Obviously giving up booze/drugs is the best thing any of us in treatment could do for our health, and in the beginning that is really enough. But as I aim to be star rehab pupil* I want to go further. For years, I have claimed to have a ~mature palette~ in that I didn't have much of a sweet tooth. Only recently I realised that I had been getting all my sugar and more from the Skrumpy Jack (etc etc) - and this is partly what the Coca Cola is replacing.

She told us about neurotransmitters: how they are out of whack in addicts; how the sugar stimulates serotonin, and caffeine and cigarettes temporarily boost dopamine (feelings of energy and concentration - hence me puffing while typing this); that there are other ways to feel ok that are healthier than booze and marly lights... Just basic life stuff I know.

Another reason I liked the workshop is that it seemed more like science than all the 12-step/AA/therapy stuff that often sits difficultly with me. My education and career placed huge importance on facts and critical thinking: the opposite of the trust and intellectual/ego submission the 'programme' seems to require. A bit in Infinite Jest called it 'checking your head in at the door' or something, which I find incredibly hard to do. I mean, the other weekend I went to a lecture about propaganda in the mainstream media, encouraging us to practice skeptism when reading the broadsheets, let alone when attending vaguely cult-like spiritual fellowships. But I am desperate, and there is evidence in the people that I meet that somehow it seems to work...

* I am amused by the oxymoron of being a well-behaved, swotty addict/criminal - handing my written work in on time with no corrections needed. Like when I went to a three-day course for convicted drink drivers and was proud to finish, in half the time of the others, the exercise calculating how long it would take for xx units of alcohol to be metabolised by the body. Smoking on my bike, reading the Guardian in MacDonalds - I enjoy such contrasts.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 504-520. I keep underlining surprising, effective pairs of words: "whistly fricatives", "sexually credible", "godawful lurch", "fussy ennui", "howling fantods".

Day 45: Hey Ma, it's me

Back in the treatment centre after the long weekend and I think I've turned a corner - or I've gone soft in the head. I was full of 'gratitude' today. After struggling with cravings over the weekend, it's like the the blinkers have been lifted and my view is flooded with the light of hope and opportunity. Look! A heron! A couple having an amusing argument outside the cafe! Isn't the Isle of Dogs beautiful!

Sadly, not everyone has managed to push on through. Out of the ten of who were on the programme when I started, one has successfully 'graduated' after completing the full twelve weeks, one has left but continued to attend NA, and four have been discharged (ie. kicked out) following relapses.

This is the hardest and scariest part for me. I had grown close to some of these people and for the most part felt like they were doing well and putting the work in. The staff and others who have been around 'the system' for longer do not seem as surprised or upset as me. It's the territory: the thing that addicts and alcoholics are most likely to do is drink or take drugs.

Statistics vary, but I heard one estimate that the 'success' rate of rehabs (not quite sure what this means - maybe people who've still not used eg. a year later)* is around 8%. It is very low anyway. And my programme is supposed to be particularly effective in the longterm. But in the short term it has many casualties: Although it has the same zero tolerance / 100% abstinence policy as a residential centre, each night and weekend we are sent back into the real world.

And I know I know it's not like anyone has died. I am keeping in touch with some of the people who have left and are continuing to attempt sobriety.

But today another one of the peers didn't turn up and by the end of the day it became clear he had not phoned in with a legitimate excuse. We tried to call but he switched his phone off - not a good sign. He is probably my 'favourite' and I am hoping so hard that he's ok. It's really given a knock to my good mood.

- Two uniformed police officers turned up at the centre today and immediately most of the guys (I'm the only girl now) were sweating, reaching for their coats. Turns out they were just on a routine visit not about any individual - but this gave me a reminder of the kind of cats I'm hanging with these days.

- Just back from AA meeting where someone picked up his 30 year chip (he got sober in May 1981 - the month I was born), and another person - I could not figure out who - stank of alcohol.

*Research needed here



INFINITE JEST: Pages 489-504
- Mathematical 14-page description (including diagrams) of a traumatic childhood mattress moving incident. Funny and pleased my brain with its intricacy. "It occured to me that the movement of the knob perfectly schematized what it would be like for someone to try to turn somersaults with one hand nailed to the floor. This is how I first became interested in the possibilities of annulation*."

* 'The act or process of forming rings'. Other new words in this section: 'metastisate'

Day 44: Telling strangers personal things

In the morning my sheets have come completely off the bed and are twisted into ropes, my skin is salty with sweat. I don't remember my dreams.

May is my powerful season, my manic month, my birthday. Three years ago on May Day Boris Johnson became mayor of London and my boyfriend moved out of the little flat we shared on Hackney Road. I threw an apple onto the floor and it lay there smashed and rotting for a week until a friend came round and cleared it up. Later that month I lost my job and had nowhere to live. Later that summer, within a fortnight, I was on both side of the law: first arrested as a drink driver and second rescued from a stranger who violently attacked and tried to rape me. It's taken me a long time to unpick everything that happened that year. And everything that happened that year was caused though or drowned in or soothed by alcohol.

I've found this four-day weekend difficult, hiding in my cell reading and sleeping. No one has visited this bedsit to see my circumstances so reduced. But something is happening: forces are at work in the night, helping me to work though and let go. Some kind of 'process'.

I lost my phone - left it on a bus - and my family were unable to get in touch with me. Mum emailed to say she was worried - she thought I'd "had a blip". I was so pleased to Skype her today and say no, I have not had a drink. It was a close one, though, and I realise how near it - the other side - is and how edgy and concerned other people still are for me. I have lived every day of these six weeks, excruciatingly conscious, but it is still not a very long time.

But I've made it though and some things are making me smile: ducking under branches as I cycle quickly along the path by the canal, the way a guy in the rehab keeps a massive can of deodorant in the waist band of his tracky bottoms like a gun, seeing old friends at a Royal Wedding barbecue on Friday, hearing in an AA meeting yesterday morning how glad people were to not have bank holiday hangovers.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 450-489.
- Another seriously gruesome death. I'm getting quite sick of this, DFW.
- Love Don Gately
- Computer-generated fatal pleasure
- Tennis tactics applicable to life in general: "Not 'adjust to conditions'. Make this second world within the world: here there are no conditions."

Day 42: Grown Men Don't Fall in the River Just Like That

Finding it hard. I feel dull and empty, missing the unpredictability of what happens when I drink.

It's like I'm getting ready for something but I don't know what it is. I am fit and healthy and clean and home alone again on Friday, Saturday night. I'm too scared to go anywhere in case I succumb to the temptation of alcohol. If this is the future, I don't want it.

I'm probably going to have to radically reassess my priorities or something but right now I just want to take on an oak tree in a fist fight.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 424-450

Day 40: WUT

I know I said I've not been following the news but it has been impossible to avoid mutterings in the treatment centre about what the Tories are doing to incapacity benefits.

After providing medical certificates and a letter from the rehab, I have just started getting Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) (£67.50 per week) and will be applying for Housing Benefit next week. I cannot claim Job Seekers Allowance (same amount) because I am in full-time treatment, so not available for work. Most of the others are in the same circumstances.

David Cameron is 'talking tough' and has picked out addicts and people with weight problems on benefits (there are apparently around 80,000 of us including 42,360 alcoholics - my peers were surprised at how low this number was!), saying that the public only wants to "pay taxes for people incapacitated through no fault of their own". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13152349

This is hard for me to hear because I was already feeling guilty about giving up my job and turning to the state. Family and friends had to reassure me that I was doing the right thing, that it's what the welfare state is there for. I am taking three months (maybe slightly more) out of work so I can become a productive, tax-paying member of society in future - not to mention happier and not dead. The way things were going with my drinking it is likely that I - at some point in months or years - could have ended up in jail or seriously mentally ill. I got to the stage where I need support to stop drinking so can't work right now. And I don't have the money to support myself or put myself privately into eg. The Priory (more about how my treatment is funded in a later entry).

I want to tell David Cameron that it was not a lifestyle choice for me to become an alcoholic or go into treatment and be surviving (in London) on £67 a week. Yes, I might have made some bad decisions (maybe just the first time I picked up a drink - something the vast majority of British adults do) but I'm not sure if I am so much more at fault than someone off work due to a back injury they got indulging in the risky activity of skiing. I have worked moderately hard in my life but I suppose that doesn't matter: This is something common in our society and therefore we must deal with it compassionately and with pragmatism, not by passing high-handed judgment. I hate the fact that I am in this situation and desperately want to do as well as I can once I get through the first part of tackling my problem.

As well as any funding cuts, I worry that the prime minister's comments will have the affect of further stigmatising other people with problems like me: Someone else who is considering going into treatment to save their life or sanity. Addiction affects people from all walks of life but cuts in benefits will affect the poorest and most vulnerable most harshly. I intend to get back into work as soon as I'm out of rehab but I have heard anecdotal evidence from others that going eg: straight out of a detox centre into a job and suddenly having the pressure of work and a bit of cash is not the best thing for some addicts and can result in relapse. In order to have the best long-term results, it often needs to be a slow and gentle process of rehabilitation. The professionals working in these fields are the best people to give advice, rather than politicians pandering the the perceived views of middle England.

Others in the centre on ESA have already received letters asking them to come into the Job Centre for an "assessment" and they're scared. I will be interested to see what actual changes will result from the government's cruel rhetoric.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 350-424

Day 35: You can dance

Off to Manchester for a couple of days. See ya!

Day 34: Bicycle Emptiness

I drift around east London on my bike, hoping that by acting like going swimming and buying groceries and texting people from AA and drinking endless Coca Cola is enough, then it will gradually become so. Alcohol has been my companion for years so of course I am missing it.

When I broke up with my boyfriend I spent a long time (an embarrassingly long, painful time) feeling like it was almost pointless to cook for one: what was the point of watching a film alone or sweeping the floor when it was only me walking on it? I am now going through a similar thing with alcohol. What is the point of picnics without booze? Am I just supposed to meet a friend but not 'for a drink'?

Aimless, jittery and jonesing. Any small thing going wrong is upsetting me disproportionately. I lost a brooch, I shrunk a jumper in the tumble dryer, there has been a delay in getting my benefits: each of these things has made me cry this week. Things like this aren't meant to happen when I'm not drinking. And this morning - it's Good Friday so we've got the day off from the treatment centre - I decided to treat myself by going into Oxford Street and getting some new make-up.

The brisk French woman in House of Fraser offered to give me a faceful and, although I hated the way she had done herself up, I agreed. I nodded and smiled when she showed me my grotesque grease-paint ballerina reflection, then rushed to another concession and was scrapping at it with tissues and cleanser before bursting into tears in the middle of the department store like a spoiled madwoman. I may have been sober for more than a month but it appears that I am in no way stable. Everything in this un-anesthetised reality is raw and sensitive.

It's suddenly summer in the city - and a bank holiday - and when I passed the corner of London Fields where all the posing cool kids hang out I got what they call in AA 'euphoric recall'. But I have to remember that the good times there, the impromtu picnics (that didn't involve much food - more Cava and poppers), only really happened in 2006, 2007. By 2008 and 2010 it tended to be just me, some cans of Kronenberg, my notebook and a mobile phone I began to hate for not beeping.

I am building my defences and, each time I don't take a drink when I feel like it, am strengthening the healthy synapses in my brain. Gradually reprogramming myself. I wanted to buy some make-up because I'm already noticing that my skin in clearer and my eyes brighter. And after a long time being single I did gradually begin to feel whole again. I didn't develop this addiction in a day, or even a month, and it will not disappear quickly either.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 312-350 (a lot read while waiting in Poplar Job Centre).
It is hard to write a blog at the same time as reading DFW's brilliance and insight on similar issues. I've destroyed the pages on the workings of Boston AA with my biro underlinings and stars and exclamation marks. There's too much that quotable here: I urge anyone to read it.
- A section on the fantastically complicated game 'Eschaton' played by the kids at the tennis academy. This game is another example of something in Infinite Jest that could be read as a microcosm of the book as a whole* (see also the J. Incandenza's film): the book is a fractal composed of similar small parts constantly multiplying outwards. (There's a theory, more on which at a later stage, that the structure of the book is a Sierpinski triangle).
- The above ideas are ripe material for what Hal Incandenza calls "marijuana thinking", when he gets "lost in a paralytic thought-helix". This is the main reason I've always hated smoking weed - the thoughts can't be stopped or captured.
- An endnote that includes mathematical equations, graphs and statistical puns (on 'mean value' hoho).
- Loving Infinite Jest at the moment!

* "Its [Eschaton's] elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost additively compelling, and shocks the tall."

Artwatch. This is the picture on tennis coach Schitt's wall:

Day 32: I count every light until I reach the shore

One month sober. Three times in the past I have managed to get to around this stage: in late 2007 (with a secret slip-up on day 14), in a failed attempt to stop my boyfriend from leaving me; September 2009, on Antabuse, trying to keep my job on the local paper on the island (didn't work); and last summer, in a failed attempt to prevent my flatmates kicking me out. This time, I've lost the boyfriend, the flat and the job so am faced with the reality of doing it for myself (ie. the only way).

NA Keyring: What I'm in this for. Going to get an AA 'chip' on Saturday too.

I go round all day with the count in my head "31,31,31... 32,32,32". I'm not sure if this will ever stop (I heard a woman in an AA meeting 'share' that it was her 4000th day sober) but I need to be living rather than just passing time.

As the moon cycles come round again I am surer that I can do this but, as I have fallen at one-month several times, must not get too cocky.

The Organ - Memorize the City (Simon Bookish Remix)
Loading SoundCloud widget code...
[I bloody love this song/remix and am annoyed I can't get the widget to work. Listen to it here: http://soundcloud.com/simonbookish/the-organ-memorize-the-city-simon-bookish-remix#]

INFINITE JEST: Pages 308-312 + dispatched the 16-page endnote like a motherfucker.

Day 30: We've lived in bars and danced on tables

Too exhaustoed to type much. But I've been noticing that, despite at first seeming like normal folks, the skewed maps of my peers are beginning to show: When I saw one of them secretively gulping a super-size can of Red Bull outside the cornershop; when I watched how another avoided apologising for his phone ringing in the nun's workshop; when weekend activities include 'swimming in the Regents canal' and 'attempting to sew up wound in own foot following treeclimbing injury'. They are all nutcases*. I'm sure I'm in the wrong place.

It's just that - when you've spent so long fucking up and covering up and apologising - it's hard to shake the feeling that you've done something wrong and the default to secretive and even sneaky behaviour that addiction involves. When I look back over these blog entries I get a flickering sense that they must have been typed while I was drunk and there is something terribly misjudged in here that I should delete immediately (as I have done with past blogs). But no - apart from the first entry ('old posts') which is 100% sloshed - I have done this sober, which is almost more terrifying. As an old drinking friend, now seven years dry, said to me: "I can still fall over and insult people, I just do it intentionally now."

*But I don't subscribe to the view that addicts/alcoholics are somehow uniquely barmy or defective, in behaviour outside drinking/using. I hate it in AA meetings when someone says "Ooh, I forgot my Mum's birthday / got lost in Soho / robbed a blind man, I'm such an alcoholic". Nah, you're just a human.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 308-311
- Was getting along ok with today's reading until I hit a 16-page endnote (which are in even smaller text size than the main book), I'm being meticulous about the endnotes and am very tired so this defeated me for the day.
- At more than 300 pages, this is the most I've ever read* of a book that has no sex. Plenty of death but no sex so far. Hm.

*slight exaggeration

Day 29: Don't falter

This afternoon I went to watch some of the London marathon going past and bumped into one of my rehab peers - who had two pints of lager at his feet and glazed eyes. He started explaining that he was drinking because there had been some problem with his benefits but I didn't understand. I wanted to get away from him really, and gave him a hug and got on the next train. I will be interested to see if he's there tomorrow, if he passes the breathalyser / urine test or if he 'fesses up. It upset me but I'm not going to shop him in. God knows I have done similar.

When I was a kid, one of our cats disappeared and we presumed he had died. He returned to the farm more than a year later - he must have been living down rabbit holes and eating wildlife - with just one ear and half his whiskers, a scar down his face, muscular and twice his old size. Although he was our old pet, we were scared of him now, backing off, almost jumping on chairs as he approached. Where have you been? This is a bit like how I feel when someone relapses.

I don't feel swayed, though. This morning I went to a lecture on Noam Chomsky's Propaganda Model at the South Place Ethical Society. An academic lecture! On a Sunday morning! I really have spent a lot of time in nightclubs in my life (and also a lot of daylight in bed with a hangover): it's time for something different.

[Here's a Spotify playlist of the music on this blog]


INFINITE JEST: Page 274-308.
- More about Don Gately / Orin / Tony Krause. I am getting to understand the characters and different worlds a bit better and now wonder how they fit together, if indeed they do.
- Here's what happened when someone anonymously posted the first page of IJ on Yahoo for criticism. #internetfunnies

Day 27: Will you meet me by the river's edge?

I'm still using my old appointment diary - from my last life - and marked in the box for today is 'exam: media law'. If I hadn't quit my job and gone into treatment I would have been taking these journalism exams this week - the same ones I sat and failed in November (turns out using your study week to get pissed is not an effective revision technique). I really wanted to get this professional NCTJ qualification to feel less like a chancer and improve my prospects.

Now, looking at this, it feels foolish. The best thing I can do for my so-called career is to stop drinking - nothing was working the way I was playing it, even if I do know what the Chatham House Rule is. But after just three weeks I am worried about what's going to happen after I leave rehab, workwise. I'm concerned that I am losing my shorthand (taking Teeline notes in a reporters notebook in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is not the done thing).

Confession: I've not been following the news. When I was working, I somehow felt it was my duty to listen to the Today programme in the morning and be flicking onto BBC News all day at work. I guess it's part of my 'being gentle to myself' strategy that I've avoided details of natural disasters and North African dictators and Government cuts, anything that would sway my delicate sober butterfly off course. I am glad that I am away from a computer all day and don't have a smart phone: It's satisfying to come home to one or two proper emails rather than checking it fruitlessly all day (we'll come to 'cross addiction' at a later stage). And to my surprise I've found that the news keeps on happening quietly out there, the internet does not stop without me.

The end of another sober week and I am bit of a raggle fraggle. Waking from bad dreams with the howling fantods, battling extreme cognitive dissonance re: the cravings (which are not, however, as bad as I imagined they would be a month or two ago when I felt I could not survive if I didn't drink), jolting panic moments when it's like I've suddenly come to and have found myself - me, ambitious, conscientious me - suddenly labelled an alcoholic and institutionalised, as if it wasn't my choice. What did they do to my life? Where is my beautiful wife? Where is my large automobile?

But I'm Riding It Like A Soldier. This afternoon we had Acupuncture for Junkies - awkwardly handling our imaginary glowing balls of chi, with needles sticking out of our ears and third eyes, trying to take the pan pipe music seriously. Then I rushed, all anti-Zen, for a cigarette then to hoover the room (we have different 'therapeutic duties' each week) before jumping on my bike to power along the canal to this little bench I've found. Lightheaded, reading Infinite Jest with blossom swirling in the breeze around me, waving at mysterious officials in orange boats, the Mister Softee van Yankee Doodling from location unknown and aeroplane vapour trails across east London's sky: I thought this is wild. I'm finding that being sober can be kind of a trip. Like, a pretty rubbish trip where you'd curse the dodgy dealer, but fairly freaky nonetheless.

Light Asylum: Shallow Tears by SUPMAG

INFINTE JEST: Pages 252-274
- Loved the Hal/Orin phonecall
- more tennis
- back in the Recovery House. Inpatient Geoffrey Day is a bit familiar: "It's the newcomers with some education that are the worst, according to [staff member] Gene M. They identify their whole selves with their head, and the Disease makes it command headquarters in the head".
- (massive endnote on this: "I found myself in yet another Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting, the central Message of which was the importance of going to still more Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings".)

Day 24: All the elements we must conquer

I'm not going to write much today because I'm so tired. I just had a Doctors appointment and asked him if it could be the Campral wiping me out but he said (and I already knew this really) that it's much more likely to be simply the effort of the rehab programme and well as my body adjusting to life without booze (plus the daily hour-cycle, Infinite Jest reading, blogging, eating etc It's so hard being me).

Before I vent, I'll mention that I was much less frustrated with everyone today. We went though a couple of gruelling group sessions - with the focus on one person in each - but came out having made some breakthroughs and laughing and hopeful about our collective sober futures...

But the therapy keeps reminding me of two things. Firstly this passage from Zoë Heller's brilliant Notes on a Scandal (from the perspective of the bitter, reactionary, wise narrator):

"It's always fascinating to hear bleeding hearts give their soppy rationalizations for delinquency. As far as I can tell, teachers have been congratulating Sheba and Richard for years on having a daughter who is full of grit and spunk, and whatever else it is that modern little girls are meant to be made of. Then, the minute Polly is found guilty of anti-social behaviour, they're falling over themselves to say her toughness is merely bravado. Polly is 'vulnerable', they say. She is 'anxious'. Well, excuse me - everyone is anxious. The fact that Polly administers Chinese burns to twelve-year-olds in order to get them to surrender their Mars Bars isn't a 'behaviour'. It's a mark of her character, for goodness' sake."

Secondly, the Forer effect.

But the fact is that these "bleeding heart" (and I normally count myself one of these) strategies do seem to be working. I know I should discard some of my tough skepticism and just 'trust in the programme', but this is not going to happen easily. I don't think I do faith.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 230-252
- Joelle van Dyke suicide. DFW seems to specialise in intricately written scenes culminating in a virtuoso-controlled death (perhaps his own life is the Mothership of this pattern?). When Joelle gets high she sees Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the mirror. I wasn't sure what this looks like but I love you, internets: - Beginning of excellent phone conversation between brothers Hal and Orin Incandenza.

Day 23: Brother, we can do so much more together

Day nine in the Big Recovery House. 1.19pm. Curlew is in the carpark, smoking two cigarettes and drinking from three bottles of Coke, Diet Coke and sparkling water (trying to cut down).

It struck me a couple of days in that there are a lot of parallels between this treatment programme and my favourite telly show of the 00s. When I started there were ten of us - all hoping to the last the whole 12 weeks - but already one has walked (it was just too intense, he hadn't realised what he signed up for) and another has been evicted following a 'relapse' (rehab speak meaning he went out and got pissed). But today two new housemates were introduced. Will the viewers warm to these newcomers? What will their story arcs be?

But my feelings towards the 'characters' are developing in a different way to the ones of TV - where I usually begin by thinking they are all wankers but begin to warm after watching few well-edited conversations (before going back to thinking they are wankers again). I began this programme with an open mind, reckoning that despite our different backgrounds we were all there for the same reasons - to get clean and sober. But today I have getting frustrated at some of my housemates - I think some are perhaps there as a way of avoiding/working the prison/probation system, I am frustrated at the slow pace of some groups and limited / misused vocabularies ("objective" does not mean "angry"), frustrated that someone still has to read the words of the Serentity Prayer despite having to say it - I estimate - around 120 times in the last five weeks. I have never wanted to be a teacher and am having to ~learn~ some patience. [It strikes me here that I am using this blog as a way to vent at the end of the day. In general I feel positive about it all and I know I should be - I am - concentrating on my own behaviour].

Also, it is difficult not to be a little more wary of people after hearing about things they have done (violence, crime, cheating on wives) - despite knowing that these things happened when they were under the influence, and knowing that I have or could have done similar. I am still unwilling to think that addiction is completely a disease, or that it lessens or even absolves personal responsibility.

Despite these frustrations, the 'group bond' constantly referred to in Big Brother is still there. I know much more about and am closer to these people I have known for two weeks than others I worked with for years. Rather than being separated by desks, hiding behind computers, we spend four or five hours a day sitting in a circle, truly communicating with each other. I come home with their voices ringing in my head and able to conjour in my mind the nervous mannerisms and vocal tics that come up when it's their time to 'share' (rehab's 'diary room'): flattening the hair, touching the nostrils, "as it happens", "in one regard". I'm also frowing (not 'throwing') a few 'innits' into my speech. Innit.

Tearjerking scene for the day (the producers will definitely use this in the highlights show): One of the older housemates was talking about his family - from whom he has been estranged for more than a decade due to his chronic drunkeness. He said he has learned not to think about them too much and, when he goes to sleep, tells himself that he should not dream about them, one-by-one (son, daughter, wife). "But then I have no one to dream of".



INFINITE JEST: Pages 211-230.
- Hal's got hold of some incredibly potent drug DMZ (AKA Madame Psychosis). He "invites you to envision acid that has itself dropped acid"
- tennis-playing Siamese twins
- Page 223 has a chronology of "subsidized time" that would have been useful 200 pages ago, cheers DFW.
- I found out that, at 483,994 words, IJ is about six times the length of an average novel.

Day 20: Let go, you're killing me

We got to leave the centre this afternoon and it felt like a combination of a school trip and a prison break: A collection of giggling raggle fraggles set free on the London public transport system without our keepers.

The occasion was the Annual London Narcotics Anonymous Convention at Euston. At first I didn't want to go but it was mandatory so I said I'd tag along "out of interest". It was the first day of a weekend attended by more than 1000 recovering addicts which will include a drink and drug free rave tomorrow night (a step too far for me I think. I don't mind being sober but everyone? Just weird.). It was a bit overwhelming and I left after an hour or two. I mean, they were selling Tshirts and mugs there - who buys that stuff (me next year)?

Before one of the meetings a statement was read asking that any members of the press identify themselves at reception and stressing the importance of anonymity. Although I was there legitimately I felt nervous. Sometimes - and I guess this is an unhealthy distancing technique - I kind of imagine that I'm just there (rehab, meetings) as an observer, for an article. That I'm an undercover journalist so dedicated to getting the story that I spent the last decade developing an alcohol problem so I could infiltrate the system with verisimilitude.

Which leads me to think about this blog. Am I doing is as therapy, to keep in practice writing while I'm out of work, for attention, to inform/amuse my friends, or to uncover some kind of radical new truth about the rehab process that will make my name as a fearless gonzo reporter? I'm feeling a bit unsure about it all - as well as fearing being called upstairs to the counsellors' office to see this url on the screen as I'm handed my coat (I feared similar years ago when I did this cleaner blog).



INFINITE JEST: Pages 204-211 (read on bench on the Greenway next to the Olympic stadium).
A section on the tattoos of Ennett House residents. In the next few weeks, I might ask my peers to tell me about theirs.

Day 19: Strike another match, go start anew

At lunchtime we are talking about vitamin supplements (most of us alchies have been prescribed various types of vitamin B) - how useful they are, whether it is better just to get vitamins through eating fruit and vegetables. "I mean, when you've had a salad, can you immediately feel it doing you good?". I realise that, because we are all addicts, the conversation had quickly developed into how much of a buzz you can get off a carrot.

We need to be vigilant. Somehow, a pint glass had got into the kitchen cupboard - one with Red Stripe (one of my old drinks of choice, as it happens) branding - and we were soon discussing our favourite types of beer: real ales, wheat beer in huge glasses or super-strength cans of lager. It was enough to get the saliva going. The staff were pretty angry when they saw the glass and tried to flush out the culprit but no one admitted bringing it in.

One thing I used to dislike about AA was how reminiscing about fond alcohol memories seemed to be frowned on. I've had lots of good times drinking - although steadily fewer in recent years. But I am beginning to see the reasoning behind it. It is something we can no longer do successfully so there's no point setting off those associations.

In the treatment centre, saying 'cheers' instead of 'thanks' is risky territory.

But black humour sustains us. This morning, a lot of people were late and one of my peers suggested that - due to the summer-like sunny weather yesterday on our day off - there had been a 'mass relapse'. This just made me laugh and laugh - a bit guiltily - I suppose because it could be true and also because the idea appeals to the nihilistic urge in me (in all of us?) that - despite the rehab, the consequences, the pain - thinks it would be funny just to say 'fuck it all'.

I am being very gentle with myself. Yesterday I mainly just lay in the park. I drank no Coke and smoked no cigarettes (and also, tellingly, did not write anything). I feel like the new sober me is a delicate newly hatched chick and I am not going to let her be shaken or squashed. I am trying to pay attention to my needs (anxious, tired, lonely, hungry) - things previously I would often have dealt with by an unsubtle, and ultimately unhelpful, application of booze.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 151-204 (mainly read lying in the sunshine in Victoria Park).
- A huge father-to-son monologue, the Dad gradually moving from pedagogic to broken.
- Madame Psychosis (a radio host)
- More from the Tennis Academy, and the Recovery House where you learn, among many other things, "that the skin is actually the body's biggest excretory organ", "that it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person" and:

"That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you will think you will surely die if you don't, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and your face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving will eventually pass, it will go away - at least for a while."

I'm getting a lot from Infinite Jest - it's vast and funny and I admire it greatly but I don't know if I'm enjoying it yet. It is certainly not a 'pageturner' and demands concentration. Maybe this is why, I've heard, so many readers only get to around page 200. And maybe I will never enjoy it - although I will finish it - but maybe fun is not what this is all about?

Day 17: Ride it like a Soldier

All day we are encouraged by the counsellors to give our feelings about everything we say or that happens in the group (I need to be careful not to carry this habit over into civilain life: "Mister Shopkeeper, the way you avoided my eye throughout our transaction (two-litre bottle of Coke and 10 Marly Lights) brought up feelings of rejection for me...").

The other day, pressed to find a ~feeling~ to express on some drug-induced criminal activity, one of my 'peers' reached deep within himself and came up with "Ride it like a Soldier". While this is not strictly a ~feeling~ it made us all laugh - releasing the tension in the room caused by repetition of 'ashamed', 'guilty', 'sad' - and has become a bit of a catchprase in the group.

One of the main ~feelings~ I've been having in the last couple of days is a sense of luckiness. I've been listening to the others' stories and ~feel~ so sad at the places their addiction took them. But I have never injected drugs, been a prostitute, smoked crack in front of my baby, spent eight years in a Russian prison*, mugged an old man in the park, or been though six detoxes and four rehabs - painfully relapsing each time. My family still speak to me and I've not turned yellow. I looked around the room and realised that everyone who had been married was either divorced or separated (and a couple of the others are in abusive relationships). I am not yet 30 and I want to get sober before I get married. I don't want to break anyone else's heart with my drinking.

Some people might use these comparisons to make them think that they are in the wrong place - their problem is not serious enough to be in treatment. But I know that some of these things could have happened to me - I just have less years of it and a more supportive, middle-class background. Although I didn't, I've always felt I could easily become a cocaine addict (which is why I've always conspired to have neither a dealer's number nor any money). I feel am in the right place. In fact, I know.

*But my minor criminal record gives me some rehab cred.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 127-151.
- A street dialect passage from the point-of-view of heroin addict, ending in a gruesome ("one eye it like allofa sudden pops outof his map") death after a laced 'hotshot';
- Introduction to Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House ("the founder, in the House's early days, required incoming residents to attempt to eat rocks - as in like rocks from the ground - to demonstrate their willingness to go to any lengths for the gift of sobriety");
- An amusing industrial accident reminding me of my last job writing about health and safety;
- A pastiche of adjective-heavy bad journalism that gave me a back tingle-sweat as I thought it resembled some of my own writing;
- An involved socio-economic analysis of the failure of 'video telephoning' - cleverly predicting current behaviour with things like Skype and Facetime. ("A traditional aural-only conversation - utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes... you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end's attention might be similarly divided.")

Day 15: WTF was that?

Today it's just a song and video that I like at the moment. No solipsistic meanings linked to my life.

Exhausted after the move, and finally writing my (ugh) "life story" just now (due tomorrow) - one and a half hours of non-stop longhand handwriting. I'm journalled out.



INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 119-127. DFW doesn't half go on. All the time while reading IJ I have to push to back of my mind this hilarious, accurate, yet also somehow unfair Onion article. But (solipsism alert) reading this is a bit like 'recovery' - there are times when it's going to be hard but you've just got to push on.

Day 14: A room with a three-bar fire

I have never lived alone before, I feared I would drink my self to death in there.

But I had to move out of my shared place and, knowing that I am not going to drink, have come around to the idea. So today I moved into a bedsit above a pub (I know, but there's a pub or off licence on every corner) beside the canal in Hackney Wick - equidistant between the Olympic Stadium and a massive Big Yellow self storage facility.

When I cycled down to view the place - just five days ago - I felt excited. The area is somewhere between industrial and urban and changing so fast that Google Maps is not a reliable navigator. There are odd little cafes and galleries popping up between the construction yards, squats and newly-built blocks of flats, everything operating under the spectre of Summer 2012. (I'm trying to ignore the fact that I might be a cliche, I read an article the other day 'An open letter to the hipster': "So what to do? Where to go next? (And please don't say 'Hackney Wick')".)

When I started properly writing diaries - age ten or so - I imagined one days having so many that they'd be piled up along the wall, with my typewriter* on the floor. And when I was 14 or 15 I read an article in Bliss / Just 17 (?), 'lives of the stars', which had photos of Donna** from Elastica's and Shampoo's London flats and imagined my own place as being a cross between the two. I used to listen to Elastica's first album again and again vaguely hoping "one day I'll have my own bedsit and emotional problems in Camden". Now I'm living the dream.

It was satisfying to unpack my books and hang up my clothes, surrounding myself with all my favourite trinkets without anyone else's annoying taste in DVDs or cutlery. Mismatched plates, dense literature, heart-shaped boxes and a jug of daffodils.

I think part of me just hates mediocrity: I'd rather live on a farm on the edge of a Scottish island or an inner-city bedsit than the suburbs. I want to have dramatic success or fail beautifully. I've been wondering if I had been more successful in my chosen career then I would have continued trying to be a 'functioning alcoholic'. The answer is 'probably' - although I didn't and I wasn't.

I am feeling more like myself, more confident. I mean, I've even unlocked my Twitter account. I am Curlew and I'm an alcoholic: I am unemployed, broke, single, in rehab, living in a tiny room and happier that I have been in years.

* Laptop
** Now a Born-Again Christian following a skag problem

[When the van left earlier, the sun was shining and the stress of the move was pumping round my body, I really wanted a drink. Just one (hahaHAHA) pint of lager. It was the exact set of circumstance that led me to break my ten-day attempt at sobriety in January. But I sat and breathed and thought about everything - the last two weeks, the future, the stupidity - and got through the craving.]

Day 13: I've been drunk in every room and on every floor of the world's tallest building. There's nothing in my heart

Packing up before moving house tomorrow. Symbolically leaving my corkscrew. Should probably throw away all these condoms too since, without alcohol, I'll probably never have sex again.

Wrung out. The first week in rehab has been incredible but everyday people talk about awful things they did when drinking or taking drugs, and each time it brings up memories of my own I had thought I had forgotten.

Flash to being on the floor of a train, somehow under a table of four strange men. Not sure if I was being sick.

Flash to being in a small town in Spain late at night knocking on random house doors trying to find what I thought was a nightclub that I thought people in the bar had told me about even though we did not speak the same language.

In London crying on pavements and ringing on buzzers in the middle of the night, unwanted. On The Island, lying underneath a cash machine. In Edinburgh, waking with someone in my bed who hadn't been there when I passed out. I wish none of it had happened.



INFINITE JEST: Pages 109-119. Can't help but compare the Tennis Academy to my treatment centre, a lot of similarities: "'The point,' says Hal softly, 'is that it's not about the physical anymore, men. The physical stuff's just pro forma. It's the heads they're working on here, boys. Day and year in and out. A whole program.'"

The question is: Am I being indoctrinated into the methods of the 12-Step programme, or am I beginning to see everything though the prism of Infinite Jest?

Day 12: Keeping Up

On my belly on the floor, back arched, arms stretched out behind with fingers locked, trying my hardest to hold my breath. Maybe attempting put us in touch with our primal selves, she said, "you were born to to this". And that was it, my pose collapsed in laughter along with everyone else.

All my life has been leading up to this. Doing Kundalini Yoga with a bunch of pissheads and junkies in various states of physical disrepair and mental anguish on an institutional carpet.

A particularly difficult move had to be repeated thirty times but the teacher promised "by the end you'll be flying". So, addicts all, we chased that high. It's one of the weirdest afternoons I've had in a while.

Three days in, I'm getting some of the jokes. While some people genuinely mispronounce words, others pretend to, certain phrases have been give verbal versions of my sarcastic quotes. In intensive communities like this all sorts of language and in-jokes develop, as a way of bonding, and also just of getting though. All is not what it seems.

The group includes older Cockneys who genuinely use rhyming slang, Muslim rude boys with patois I don't understand ("raggle fraggle"?). But all it not what it seems. I'd noticed a little plaster on someone's inner ear - and today they explained that it was from last week's acupuncture session. All week I'd thought it was some sort of 'gang thing'.

[Also, this morning in 'community meeting' there was an amnesty - where we could admit if we've been 'using' without getting thrown out. After a long long silence, someone admitted he had been smuggling in coffee.]



INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 93-109. Passages on both the Enfield Tennis Academy and The Wheelchair Assassins of Southern Quebec. Tribes with their own ways like the one I am becoming part of.

"It turns out Lemon Pledge, when it's applied in pre-play stasis and allowed to dry to a thin crust, is a phenomenal sunscreen, UV rating like 40+, and the only stuff anywhere that can survive a three-set sweat."

Day 11: Shackles

Wednesdays are our day off the from the treatment centre (we attend Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 9:30 - 4:30). The day we are expected to have doctors appointments, sort out benefits, see probation officers, and otherwise do things to unpick the messes that addicts tend to have created around themselves. As part of the programme, we also have to attend three AA or NA (it's worth pointing out that, as far as I can see so far, out of our group of ten only me and one other are there 'simply' for alcohol - the rest are also addicted to cocaine, heroin and probably a whole pile of other things I haven't heard of) meetings a week - outside of the centre.

But I haven't been to a meeting today, just spent my time Dealing With It. Crossing things off my list and seeing one of my oldest friends who has helped out with some practical things I was worrying about. I'm realising that I've spent a lot of the last few years 'isolating' myself and handling everything alone: free (to drink, mainly). But real friends will be there for you and just make life more fun. Other people do unexpected things. By myself I just go round and round the same patterns thinking it's the best and only way to be.

People thinking about having a baby say they suddenly start noticing pregnant women and prams everywhere. In the same way, references to bloody rehab and alcoholics are cropping up all over the shop. Today I pressed play on my favourite podcast This American Life, hoping to be drawn into one of the tales ordinary people in exceptional circumstance that they do so well, but the first story of the episode was flipping well about a teenage girl sent to a drug treatment. YAWN. I didn't leave it playing for long enough to find out much more. I need to escape from this some of the time. (I'll listen to it later, I'm sure it's brilliant as ever).

One of the other ways we are expected to fill out days off (and evenings, weekends etc) is doing the 'work' we are set. My first task, due in next week, is to write... 'my LIFE STORY'. WHAT. "We expect about three or four pages of A4", the councellor said, looking at me sympathetically like she knew this was a lot to ask. (Another thing worth noting here is that, out of the ten of us, two don't have English as a first language and and three or four seem to have have pretty big problems with reading and writing).

Now, I thought, I have written journals obsessively for more than twenty years and have a degree in English (which included a dissertation of the diaries of literary women that got a first), have sheaves of rubbish semi-autobiographical short stories, caches of abandoned blogs, shoeboxes of letters and inboxes of emails: where do I start? Should I hand in a 60,000 word multi-perspectival Nabakov pastiche with an unreliable narrator? Or perhaps I should play around with the structure - write from the viewpoint of my unborn great-great-grandaughter in 2100 who, having retreated to a post-nuclear island, has found remnants of my Livejournal and is tracing back the reasons why she, too, is an alcoholic? Or should I just drop this box in the middle of the group therapy circle and say analyse this?
What I will no doubt do, however, is write five or six standard pages with just the right amount of subtle mentions of my father's mental illness or my own 'lack of self worth' to make them think they can really get somewhere with me, or that I can get somewhere with myself.

Does anyone get the feeling that my arrogance might be a 'block' to my 'recovery' (as well as my tendency to place any 'treatment' language in sarcastic quotation marks)?

OK, despite this facetiousness, I've had a pretty good day and am enthusiastic about the programme and think that it will work for me. Maybe it's the Campral, or maybe it's the amount of coca cola I've been drinking (a fucktonne) but I've certainly not wanted booze as much today.

I'm finding that the times of the day that used to be the worst for me: first thing in the morning (panic-waking at 5.30am, checking my phone and outbox to find out what the hell I did the night before, then later - throbbing hungover and guilty - trying to get to work, act straight) and late in the evening (when the solo drinking would tip over from liberating to desperately lonely) are now actually the best times. I am happy to wake fairly fresh and clean, remembering what I did; and in the evenings am almost proud to have got through the day without it. I know it's really really early days but there have been - fleeting - genuine moments of joy each day.



INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 78-93: The introduction of some highly confusing double/triple agents in some kind of international espionage (including I think a transvestite), "the screeming meemies" (a weaker version of the howling fantods) and a good description of a herd of stampeding feral hamsters ("tornadic, locomotival").