Feline Warrior

It sounds all fun and frivolous: “Oh [tee-hee] I’m an alcoholic!” [insert silly sticky-sweet shooter here]

Not that. I’m talking about an alcoholic. A person who, once they take that first drink, is in the grips of a monster. Once it starts, it seems impossible to stop. That sort of thing. Not the giggly knucklehead who thinks that it’s funny to “confess” to being an alcoholic after two shooters.

So yeah, the tough stuff. A friend of mine who had been sober for over 5 years decided to drink over the weekend. At first I thought “Why the hell did she do that?” and the next thought sort of boomeranged off the dumb question: She’s an alcoholic. I’m of the belief that an alcoholic must make a total change in order to stay free of booze. Total as in physical, spiritual, mental. This friend did not do that. I watched her struggle with a bunch of issues, and we bonded over the inappropriate relationships we had with our fathers. (That alone sets off a storm of potentially lifelong troubles.)

We talked today and she said, “well, it was probably a long time coming,” a statement with which I could agree. Still… unavoidable. All those “-isms” are unavoidable, but it takes a ton of hard work to get to the other side of them.

I’ve written here about a friend who committed suicide (sat down with a gun, shot himself), another who overdosed (a suicide, too, just a slower process), and others I didn’t know who were murdered, committed suicide… and it’s just heavy. I mean it feels physically heavy. I’m sad about my friend, but I think she’s back on track now. It’s that other sadness that I talk about sometimes - the faceless sadness, the longing that I cannot explain. And tonight I will add that it’s a heaviness of not understanding why we aren’t just smart enough or well equipped with the proper tools (or something) to fix ourselves.

It’s not so easy as that, I know. Hell, I am still good for a few more years of therapy, I’m just putting it off because I dread it so. (Finding a good therapist is like dating, but without the potential for sex - of course a good thing in the therapeutic context - I’m just sayin’.) Anyway, in talking with Ari during his meltdown, I kept thinking about how damaged we are. The universal “we” - that means you, me, and the guy behind you. You can’t always tell looking at someone, but it’s almost a certainty that he or she has lived through some kind of crazy bullshit.

So what does that have to do with an alcoholic drinking? Everything and nothing. Why are people alcoholics in the first place? Why do alcoholics go back to drinking after a time of sobriety, when they know damn well that it’s going to be bad news? (These are rhetorical questions, but if anyone has a serious answer, I’d love to hear it.)

Glad she’s back on the wagon, sorry that I’m back in a place of questioning life. It’s furnished (that place is) with questions about God, afterlife, the Bible, Koran, Zen Buddhism, meditation, prayer, and everything in between. I leave almost nothing out, in terms of organized religious groups, when I visit that place. Every time that I exit that place, I feel more certain that we start alone and we end alone. That is inevitably followed by my final question for the evening: What are you doing with the in-between?