Each morning this week when I've gone for my appointment (breathalyser test and drug administration) with the nurse, I have felt well-rested and buoyant. I am definitely not going to cry today, I think, before the tears start welling then flowing when I talk about how frustratingly, baffingly tempting it is to drink each sunny afternoon; about the relief that things are finally out in the open - with work, friends, family; about my shame at being in this situation in the first place; and of my hope for the future.
Alongside the Regents Canal where I am going to be cycling every day for the next three months, an immense building is being constructed - probably 'luxury canal-side apartments', or maybe halls of residence for Queen Mary University. I plan to observe this everyday and try to figure out just how buildings are built - the materials bought on barges, the cranes, the concrete structure followed by scaffolding and glass. Try and use my brain to observe and learn something rather than the flitting-on-the-surface way it usually functions, white-knuckling, from drink to hangover to drink (do brains have knuckles?). By June, when I hope to 'graduate' from the programme, the building should be complete.
It is spring now and there's so much going on in this boisterous part of London and I want to get stimulation from little things outside myself: the women in hijabs leaning on the park fence stretching their calf muscles after a run, the Dad on a racer bike dragging his joyous little son on a scooter, the confused and lonely heron in the drained boating lake.
This afternoon I went for my preliminary meeting at the treatment centre I will be attending full-time for the next twelve weeks. Waiting in reception, someone asked me if I was one of the counsellors, I guess due to my relatively smart attire and freshish face, or maybe my university non-accent. No, I said, I'm just here.
I chatted with some of the inmates smoking outside (from afar, you can identify a group of recovering addicts by the plume of smoke) - men with faces that have seen as much pain as cocaine - and they told me about the sandwich van that comes daily (I intend to take pack-lunches of superfoods, I thought), the bus pass they give you (I'm a cyclist) and the free weekly acupuncture sessions (now that I could be down with). They were in tracksuits and T-shirts and I began to worry about what I'm going to wear. My wardrobe consists of corporate office wear, vintage dresses and slinky nightclub outfits from American Apparel. Maybe I'll buy some jogging bottoms? But at the same time - while I want to stop job drinking - I don't want to change who I am completely (some work to do here, I feel).
There are many things I am scared of getting into this but near the top of the list is losing my edge. I don't want to become someone sanctimonious who tuts at teenagers drinking alcopops, neither do I want to acquire evangelical eyes and talk in therapy platitudes.
But the truth is, my edge was blunted some time ago. Like, I'll hear a great song or new band and think 'this'll sound fantastic in a club or live - with other people' but by the time I get there (if indeed I get there at all after having too many over-excited sharpeners at home), I'll be too trolleyed to take in, let alone enjoy or remember the music or conversation.
Where was my edge when I was physically ejected from a nightclub in front of loads of people I know - kicking and screaming against bouncers - for reasons I don't remember and have been too embarrassed to find out? Was it cool to be crying at parties to anyone who would listen about how my boyfriend left me because of my drinking while swigging from a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass of wine in the other? Was it cool to ruin my friend's poetry reading with coked-up incomprehensible heckles? Was it cool to be lying on the floor of a pub toilet, with people too weary to do anything to move me? It was some years ago I began to get the inkling I was no longer being invited to the hippest parties due to my increasingly embarrassing and burdensome behaviour.
But it was not just the parties, or my ex, or the diminishing spurious edge that got me to this point. It was, to borrow another AA phrase (they are often, annoying, perfect), that I was sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired.
INFINITE JEST UPDATE: Pages 27-49. Not quite sure what's going on, but there's more tennis, a futuristic medical attache to a middle eastern king, dates named after corporate products, repression, mental illness and at least one virtuoso image or analogy per page:(on a father's death)"Remember... there are two ways to lower a flag to half mast... one way is just to lower the flag... you can also just raise the pole."
Note: First use in the book of the title of this blog: "Roaches give him the howling fantods". Hooray!
(I heard you had a Spotify playlist of all the bands mentioned in Losing My Edge)
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