A Scotch Away

I never really liked the taste of scotch, and now a non-drinker, I couldn’t give the song its justice by writing ‘An O’Doul’s Away’. I quit drinking in 2008, as part of a challenge with each of my happy hour friends. We would meet at the bar for happy hour at our favorite local cantina most days of the week. We were all friendly with the bartenders and manager and as ‘regulars’ they could always depend on us to exceed their profit margin with every pour. Until our challenge with each other in 2007 on New Year’s Eve, to give up drinking for 30 days. I remember the bar manager laughing and saying ‘I wish you would have warned me I would have adjusted our budget’.

I set a one-dollar bill down on the bar and said ‘here’s your warning’. One of us lasted about two weeks. Another one lasted almost thirty days. Another came in the next day and said they quit-the-quit. I went 30 days, 60 days, 90 days and then onto 18 years.

My drinking was a coping mechanism to mask depression. Usually a broken heart or a failed love. After all, I’m in Nashville and I’m a songwriter, that’s what we write about. Oh, and trucks, but I don’t have one.

Drinking numbed my feelings, allowed me to be ‘up’, engaged, and the life of the party. Even if it was a party of one, I needed the buzz, the numbing. It was also an ‘excuse’ for whatever I might say or do ‘under the influence’. I was never a ‘drunk’ and I could always find my way home. I started parking my car out front of the cantina facing the direction of my house. Less turns, just a couple straight lines and I’m home.

I knew it was time to quit. My mornings started with thinking about drinking and then ruled my day. I’d imagine my ‘later’ sitting outside in the gazebo with a glass of wine, or two, or three. I’m an all-or-nothing person. I can’t do ‘moderation’. It had to be a complete quit, or a complete drown. So, I quit. Again, and again, and again.
I don’t know why 2007 NYE stuck this time, but it did. Maybe I didn’t want to have to ‘start all over’ counting if I quit-the-quit as well. I hated math. I remember the first year of sobering, I was more depressed than I’d ever been, mentally and physically. It felt like my body was exhausted and fighting against me. I was determined to take back control, at least for that day.

In my mind I kept saying to myself that tomorrow, tomorrow if I still want a drink, I’ll have one then. Ironically, putting off having a drink until tomorrow gave me something to look forward to in my agony of today. I think I was tricking my mind into believing that this quit thing is just temporary. I could have a drink whenever I wanted, I told myself, because I’m adulting, I’m making my own decisions.
It’s now been eighteen years of tomorrows…of adulting!

Over those years I’ve declared that I would start drinking again when I turned 60. I did not. Then it was 65 that I’d start again. It was not. I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s, my dad to kidney disease and extreme grouchiness. I did not drink. I wanted to. I still want to, but it doesn’t rule my mind like it did.

Maybe I will, tomorrow, but not today.