Sober For October In January
We were over in the UK in September 2018 when we kept hearing PSAs every time we turned on the telly for something that sounded like “sober for October.” After about the dozenth time I cracked the code: they were encouraging people to pledge to give up alcohol for October. Not cut back, but cut out. Completely. For a month. Apparently the Brits were enjoying their local pubs just a bit too much.
Now, part of our reason for being in Cornwall and then England and then Wales was to carry out alcohol related research tentatively titled, “Patterns of Sociological and Familial Decision-making in a Random Multivariate Cross Section of Homogeneous Populations Typically Found in Pubs.” As a result, our research required us to visit pubs. Sometimes our rooms were only just upstairs from the bar. Which sounds convenient, and was, but also inconvenient because easy access to the taps quickly grew distracting, the more so when I found that asking for a strong, hoppy beer yielded pints that were uniformly meek, taste-wise and alcohol-wise. In the end, I had to console myself with having learned the secret as to how folks could spend so much time in the pubs, and drink and drink and drink, and still be able to stroll home and, with a twinkle in their eye, give their honeys a big kiss. They weren’t really drinking.
But back to sober for October.
The Light Bulb Finally Goes On
I think it was in Stratford, after hearing about sober for October for fiftieth time, that it suddenly hit me: this is exactly what I need. I’d been searching for the gumption to tamp down my imbibing for some time. Single malt Scotch and craft brews had me in their thrall. And although I hadn’t progressed to the point where I’d wake up with an immobilizing hangover, I knew that little by little the fangs of alcohol were sinking deeper into my brain.
Still, cutting back seemed beyond me. After all, days were stressful. Ambition exceeded talent. Trump was president. Reasons to seek escape seemed limitless.
The Simple Solution
But then: sober for October. Such a simple idea. Cutting out alcohol completely meant avoiding the difficulties of alternative measures, such as the idea of only imbibing on weekends, a reasonable-sounding alternative until you tried define “weekend”. If a weekend were two days, Saturday and Sunday, did that mean drinking only those two nights? Or did it mean drinking Friday and Saturday? I could never decide, so invariably it became all three. Or four, when the almost-weekend night of Thursday was included as a reward for surviving the pressures of Monday-Thursday. Or five, when the shock of Monday demanded a special dispensation. And what the hell, if there were five evenings of allowable sipping, did it really make any sense to redline Tuesday and Wednesday? And at that point, was it even possible? No: a complete break was required. One hundred percent abstention. But only for a month. A single month. And then I could go right back to drinking, with the added benefit of enjoying it more for having been buzz-free for 744 straight hours.
We arrived home on September 26, which was perfect because it allowed me four days—Thursday thru Sunday—for one last splurge of booze. As I drank, I wondered if I’d really do it. Could I really do it? Or would I find a rational excuse to break my pledge? (We are all so good finding rational excuses!)
But I did it.
The first three days were easy. Didn’t even think about booze. After Day 3, the itch began to return. I resisted. But the more I resisted, the strong it got. By October 12—a Friday—I was sure I’d give in. It was TGIF, I deserved relief. But I held back. Saturday we battled again, the Itch and I, and still I didn’t drink. Sunday I didn’t drink, and on Monday the Itch began to fade, and quickly, like a tide going out, that fast.
As the end of October approached, I knew that in a few days I’d be able to drink again. I’d have honored my pledge (which was only to myself and my wife, but still). And then it occurred to me that I didn’t want to start drinking. I wanted to extend my abstention into November. So I did, not even faltering during Thanksgiving. And at the end of November I decided to keep that sobriety ball rolling into December. On December 7, at a holiday party, I had my first drink in over two months, about three ounces of wine—and felt a tremendous revulsion. The next day I was right back teetotaling, and kept it up until the end of the month, at which point I started drinking again, one to three drinks a night, without feeling any regret, or any guilt. I just started drinking.
The Health Takeaway
But the reason I’d kept going for three months was that I felt better being totally off booze. I’d read various articles about how alcohol is harmful to your heart, liver and other organs, how it increases your risk of cancer and worsens mental health. Consequently, eliminating alcohol from my system should have eliminated those problems from my body. But honestly, I couldn’t tell. All I could tell was that I felt better, and not in any single specific way, but overall. I recall thinking during November that I felt so much better with no alcohol in my system that it didn’t make any sense to ever go back to drinking.
Alcohol: the Fearsome Antagonist
But go back I did, until April 2019, when my wife and I decided to go off alcohol for a month prior to leaving for Italy, thinking that abstaining at home would set us up for a fine time with Italian wine. But as it turned out, I couldn’t do it. I lasted maybe a week, and then snuck a drink. Two nights later I snuck another, and then I was back to drinking every night. I kept on drinking all through May, June, July, August, and September.
And then October arrived again, and we started right in again. And this time it was easy, and I kept sober until Thanksgiving. After our guests left, I intended to get back on the wagon, but no dice. The itch got me again. Which made me realize that it was always there, even after another successful sober for October/November, and would always be there, ready to seize the littlest opening to shoot its itchiness through its fangs into my brain. Because that’s the way it is: the fangs are always there.
But then, lo and behold, I became so disgusted with myself that I told my wife to hide all the liquor we had and not to buy anything else (or at least not let me see it if she did). And so, since January 1, I’ve been doing Sober for October in January, and am confident I’ll be able to keep it up, at least until February 10th, when we plan to settle onto a couple of stools in the Green Parrot in Key West to begin our next research project, tentatively titles, “Spatial and Temporal Differences in Olfactory Response to Macromolecular String Arrays in Ethanol Variants of Non-discriminating Happy Hour Specials.”
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