10 Years Ago Last Week

File this one under the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" Again, it's great to have a blog no one reads.

Ten years ago last week I was forced to change how I lived my life. Before that day I wouldn't think twice about going out to a happy hour with friends or coworkers. Alcohol is a very effective way of getting to know someone. It's widely known that alcohol decreases inhibitions, so you could say that when you get drunk, your reveal your real self. You could say that. It's not true, but that's what I thought. It can also be freeing, especially if you're repressed, afraid to be yourself, crave acceptance and fear rejection. Freeing is the wrong adjective for avoidance.

I was on the upswing of a successful career, so I was living it up. I was thinking, saying and doing things I shouldn't have and it led to some real problems. In retrospect, these were things that I needed to think, say and do, even though the price was steep. That night, after drinking over half a dozen neat double scotches, hitting the strip club and drinking more beer, I thought it was possible for me to drive home. You know what happened next.


I was pulled over after driving a quarter mile on rims after hitting a curb, sparks flying as I crossed the overpass. As I was sitting in the police car after poorly attempting to circumvent the breathalizer, I was joined by a guy with the last name of Dumas. He was a pilot who also got picked up for this offense. He had connections that were going to get him out of this. They didn't know who they were messing with. When we got to the drunk tank, he resisted the blood test. I did a poor attempt at trying to logically determine if this is something I should do. In my state, I thought maybe if I stalled long enough, some of the alcohol will move through my system, and maybe I wouldn't get hit with the harshest penalty. Fortunately for me, although I didn't think so at the time, I submitted. If I hadn't, my license would have been suspended for a year.

So Dumas was probably in trouble, if he was real. The thing is, I never saw him again. The cops didn't know what I was talking about, or they were fucking with me, as pawns of the authority love to do. Sometimes I wonder if I lost it that night and had a psychotic break or an out of body experience. Maybe I was the one in that room resisting the blood test.

I only blew a 1.7 I think, just under the next level of drunk driving offense. I spent $15,000 getting through that mistake. I got to see the bullshit bureaucracy that is mandatory counseling and AA meetings, where the counsellors are there to check boxes and cover their asses, and the AA members knew the score and checked theirs, too. They would have been there to help if I wanted it, but I wasn't as bad off as they were and didn't want help from losers. I was lumped in with people who have "real problems". So the state sure as hell made my situation worse. If I hadn't taken it upon myself to understand what I was doing and why, no one would, and I would have gotten a second or third offense.

And to that, my situation got worse before it got better. I started drinking even more. Since I couldn't go out and drink, I drank at home. A lot. I was pissed off that I was made to sit with raging alcoholics when "I had a problem, but not like they do". Which in retrospect is an evolved opinion that at least leaves the door open to the possibility that I had a problem. It was quite an education on human nature to watch my coworkers not talk about what happened, knowing full well this was some juicy gossip ripe for hours of entertainment while I was not around. It's hard to be the butt of a joke you know is being told, but that you will never hear. Real friends would have told me. I had a few that did.

It was an opportunity to stand on my own - to have my own perspective about what happened and why, and to both not rely on others to validate it and to not share it with those that would misuse it. In alchemical terms, I put a lid on that vessel and let the sludge coagulate. I withdrew. My paranoia was off the charts. I became even more cynical, misanthropic, angry, and under all that, returning very subtly at first, incredibly depressed. That depression grew to become nearly unmanageable over the course of my sentence. It ruined my relationships. It made me say and do things to push people away. I had become a sad, withdrawn, twisted bundle of despair. This was not because I couldn't drink. This was because "life was unfair" and I had to be a victim.

A DUI stays on your record for 10 years. This means that if, in that period you get caught driving while you're legally drunk, you get hit with a second offense -- which is even more draconian than the decade long black mark of your first offense.

Alcoholism is an addiction. Addiction is looking outside for something to fill the void inside, and using whatever you find to the point that it doesn't serve you and starts to hurt you. It can be alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, many things. They say addiction can be hereditary. My paternal grandfather was an alcoholic. I have other family members who are/were alcoholics. I have a step-uncle who was killed by a drunk driver. I have an aunt who counsels. You'd think I'd be equipped to handle this. I suppose I was, sort of. I didn't completely self destruct. I wasn't in complete denial. And yet I still used alcohol as an excuse to misbehave. I still used it to escape the pain of being different and the judgment from others I wished would accept me. I didn't realize that my actions only pushed the possibility of acceptance further away.

Now that my sentence is up, I can go out and get wasted again. Just kidding, but this is not an original thought. Our system doesn't focus on treatment or solutions to addiction. It focuses on punishment and bureaucracy. As long as it does that, this problem will be with us.

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