Raebolio.com

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." -Homer Simpson Wouldn't it be great if "The Simpsons" ended with Homer dying of liver cancer? Not that I hate Homer Simpson. From a narrative perspective, it's simply the only logical conclusion for a character whose story has been told for literally decades, and whose identity has prominently involved heavy drinking and overeating. It's be like the ending of "Dinosaurs" on ABC. Have you seen that shit? All the dinosaurs freeze to death because of the Ice Age, there's a lot of really heavy rhetoric about global warming and industrialism, and then it just cuts to a dinosaur news anchor talking about how it's only a matter of time before everybody dies. And then it just ENDS . Anyway. I know I already did a "final week" post, but I wanted to include a sort of "epilogue" for this experiment. I want to share how I've...

This whole time, I've kept thinking about Seth Rogen's line in "This is the End" when Jay Baruchel asks what he means by, "I'm on a cleanse." The weed part is irrelevant because I live in a state where it's illegal, so it's not part of my life. The drinking, though - that line always resonated with me because Rogen says that abstaining from mind-altering substances is "psychotic". As if trying to face reality without a chemical crutch is something only a truly insane person would attempt. There's a lot of pro-alcoholic subtext in the culture of the United States, among many others. Granted, Rogen's character is (spoilers) characterized later in the movie as a cowardly, unreliable person (no disrespect to the real Seth Rogen). Still, that joke wouldn't land if it weren't a true statement for a lot of people. The fact that I've been able to carry on without alcohol for an entire month, especially given the le...

Sobriety: Because we can't all be genius cartoon characters with bionic implants. I mentioned back in my "Week 1" post that I felt mentally clearer, that I had begun to experience less mental "fog" than usual, following my hiatus from drinking. It's gotten to the next level now. My mood is way more stable. It's easy to think clearly, and I get irritated and frustrated less frequently. I'm finding myself less distracted in general, which allows me to enjoy things like a cool sunset or nice weather. I spend less time in my head and more time in the present. To be honest, although I still miss beer, wine and liquor, I feel better than I have in years. If I were to more specifically describe how I feel, I'd say this...I feel like my "old self." I didn't really drink at all in high school. I'd had maybe a couple furtive beers here and there, but never more than one or two in a sitting, and only on two occasions before I l...

As Samuel L. Jackson once said: "Hold on to your butts." Last week was where things really started picking up. I mean that in both good and bad ways. The difficulty of abstaining from alcohol was pretty easy Week 1 because I'd had over a month to psych myself up. Avoiding getting drunk on the weekends after that hasn't been as much of a challenge as I anticipated. I forgot how easy it is to get sucked into playing hours of video games. I made entire weekends breeze by playing game after game of "Civilization", or a "Starcraft II" campaign, or breezing through my old favorite Nintendo 64 games (which I recently re-acquired). I also spent several evenings painting a bunch of Warhammer 40,000 stuff while watching clips from "Fury" and listening to D&D podcasts. I think last night, I did that from 6 PM straight through 12:30 AM. Netflix and Youtube have also been a huge boon. I can blow through literally dozens of Youtube videos...