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I had a pretty wild weekend, at least by 45-year-old sober guy standards. My wife and I took the kids back to our college, which is a massive football power school. It was Homecoming weekend, so there was an emphasis on people like me coming back to their old stomping grounds. And that meant that lots of people like me were getting absolutely hammered on every street corner and at every tailgate.
The game was fun but the weather was brutal. It was about 45 degrees and a steady rain that didn’t let up for about 36 hours. By the time we sat down in our seats, we were soaked, and then we plopped down in puddles at every seat. Within five minutes, it felt like my ass had numbed itself and then left my body.
Right around the time I felt the most soggy and shivery, four guys sat down in the row in front of us. Their gameplan for this miserable rainy day didn’t involve umbrellas or ponchos or extra warm clothing. No, they appeared to each just decide they would drink 25 beers each and be so obliterated that they stopped feeling cold.
I found myself shivering and looking at them and thinking, “Man, they look so happy. That was a smart plan.”
Well, in situations like that, I always need to remember three things. One is, maybe they are heavy drinkers who can handle that, and I am not. Secondly, who knows how their nights ended? I can say I saw quite a bit of stumbling and bumbling, and it was 4:15 pm, so I can’t imagine the next 8 hours went well for them. Third, getting hammered isn’t exactly the wisest decision to stay warm outdoors.
That point lingered with me late into the evening, when we made what was a pretty wild decision: Instead of staying overnight, we decided to drive back to Connecticut. One of my kids had a soccer game she didn’t want to miss, and my two older girls both had homework that was giving them a headache trying to do away from home. So we went for it.
It was a six-hour drive beginning at almost 10 pm after a long day of hustling around a college campus.I had a cup of coffee before we left, and I felt great for about the first 45 minutes. Then the coffee started to wear off, and I felt a little woozy by around 11. So I hit a rest area and bought two Diet Mountain Dews, and then I felt peppy again for a good 60-90 minutes. Then I started getting woozy again.
It wasn’t woozy like I was going to fall asleep. I felt tired but not sleepy, which meant I was okay to drive but my cognitive skills were rough. It took me 5 seconds to process stuff that would have taken me 1 second normally. I was slow and sluggish, and it was a little alarming.
So I made another stop and loaded up on a big coffee, which helped for another 45-60 minutes. That ultimately was enough to get us home.
I bring all of this up because it was a terrible reminder of the days when I used to get hammered, try to cover it up with caffeine and other substances, then try to get myself clear-headed enough to start doing drugs and alcohol again. It was downers, then uppers, then downers, then uppers again. I knew at the time how bad that was for me—getting extremely high and then pounding down a bunch of Diet Mountain Dews, then getting extremely high again and taking an Ambien to fall asleep is a recipe for death, not fun.
But doing it sober was eye-opening. It was horrible, and it didn’t really work, by the way. We got the whole way home without any real trouble. But I wasn’t myself. If you had given me some sort of reading comprehension test or a math quiz for a third-grader, you’d have wanted to hold me back for another year. Which means, I am very lucky to have not had any wild road situations that required fast thinking.
I need stuff like that sometimes. Because both parts of this story—the drunks whose plan to stay warm was 30 Miller Lites, and staying awake through Diet Mountain Dew, coffee and a prayer—remind me of how bad it used to be. Sometimes the most helpful thing for my sobriety isn’t some new meditation or reading that will open my eyes to something. It’s just seeing idiocy at work out there in the streets, so I can skip the late afternoon coffee, not drink booze or do drugs, and go to bed at a normal time.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
When the panhandler collapsed on the street, a crowd gathered and began offering suggestions.
"Give the poor man a drink of whiskey," a little old lady said.
"Give him air," advised several men.
"Give him a drink of whiskey," repeated the little old lady.
"Get him to the hospital," someone suggested.
"Give him a drink of whiskey," the little old lady said again.
Slowly the victim sat up. "Will you all shut up," he demanded, "and listen to the little old lady?"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 1961)
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