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".)