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