Sunday, 27 March 2011

Day 8: Always Crashing in the Same Car

Now that I'm off the sedatives, the drinking dreams have started: Last night I dropped a bottle of wine on kitchen tiles and was scooping it up in a bucket and lapping the drink, like a dog, along with dirt from the floor and broken glass.

And there's this recurring memory of once driving on The Island, so drunk that I had to close one eye to see the line in the middle of the road, when I swerved and jolted onto the grass verge. I managed regain control of the car and carried on driving but this muscle memory - of literally going off the rails - keeps jolting though my mind and body. Dropping off to sleep JOLT I'm awake again. Freewheeling on my bike in the sun JOLT I could have crashed.

I want to delete the memories of moments like this, to erase all the mistakes and addictions and hurts, so I am a fresh page. I've tried to do this - mainly with (clever, this one) more booze - but I now know this isn't possible and I'm going to have to find ways to manage the past. To Deal With It.

Despite all this, I've had a good day today. I'm drinking litres of coke, smoking fistfuls of cigarettes and thinking about drinking - but I'm fairly happy and clear-minded. After an encouraging AA meeting - where someone told me about the possibility of a flat (I'm facing the reality that I have to move house urgently) and I identified a woman who could be a potential sponsor, I went for a swim in the outdoor lido. Twenty lengths (one kilometre), clean and pure, of breast-stroke and backstroke (looking up through blue-tinted goggles at an even bluer sky). A week off the booze, that toxic taste is beginning to leave my skin and I'm sure all the baths and swimming are helping. I have always loved to be submerged.
Someone told me, I'm not sure if it's medically true, that it takes ten days for the last of the alcohol to leave your system. Perhaps next weekend I'll go for a sauna just to make sure the residue of that particular poison is gone? I'm going to have to make sure I have ways to fill the hours in the coming weeks when I'm not in the treatment centre.

So, rehab proper starts tomorrow and I'm weirdly excited about the people I will meet, the things we will do and how I will change. I don't want to be jolting along forever.



INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 60-65 read in the park in the sun. This is not a lot but included an eight-page (in tiny print) endnote (I was wrong yesterday to call them footnotes) that I considered skipping but was glad I didn't cuz it's the funniest maddest bit yet: The fictional and increasingly-psychotic filmography of James O. Incandenza, contains film synopsis such as "Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict and a deaf-mute convict together in 'solitary confinement' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other."

Also, with reference to my dreams above, a nightmare sequence describes "the sudden intra-dream realization that the nightmares' very essence and center has been with you all along, even awake, it's just been... overlooked."

Plus more tennis.

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