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?