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?