NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 1

This isn't really a live blog, more like a, I scribbled some shit down as it happened or in retrospect or maybe some crazed and meaningless sludge from my sleeping subconsciousness that I've plastered the digital walls with prior to and during my Lenten pilgrimage this year.


Weekend prior to Lent, 28FEB - 02MAR2019

06MAR2019 - Ash Wednesday

Mardi Gras had come and gone and I went to work, early-ish and hungover properly to struggle through the hours before it was time for one last pre-Mass debauch with A at the Moosehead as we'd not gone in previous to alert the staff (Sarah, Kelsey, Carol) that we were abstaining from our usual Wednesday night hockey pints and Sunday NASCAR vroom vroom day liquoring and not to worry. We sucked down pints like arrant and sunburned tropical sailors. Mass was scheduled for 7PM but Uly got too squirrelly and we had to repair home for tea et al. before the long slow dryness of this year's purgatorial Lenten progression from sinner to penitent to forgiven.

11MAR2019

Today I decided to go to the gym after seeming to catch up on all the sleep I've ever missed. The sleep without booze was my biggest fear for this Lenten season. I've abstained before, sure, but recently it's been a daily encounter on the field of substance use with my favored weighted blanket of alteration. In its absence, I've been supplementing with tea and smoke and edibles and it's been a bit of an amelioration to the longing for that which is forbidden but not something I'm altogether okay with in its execution. Questions arise, in this state, about my long term drinking's feasibility with respect to liver enzymes and an already scarred and fatty liver and all the health rot my provider parrots ad nauseum. Almost as if she doesn't get that I've got to get through the next 12 hours with a minimum of suicidal ideation and what happens to this frame when I'm 60 takes a backseat to my continued churning into the present. Why don't more folks understand this?

Notes: 
1. Dreams are absolutely insane and memorable and nearly always nightmare.
2. Two older middle aged white dudes wearing MAGA hats and holding a Corgi puppy named Thor stock up on copious amounts of weed of a 1030 Monday morning at the shop where all the cute lady shoptenders know the puppy and benignly look away at the red ribbon of these dudes' political leanings. What a world.
3. Yesterday, did it even happen?

12MAR2019

Flight and lodging logistical horseshit with train and plane timetables and scheduling and all the inane horseshit borne from a lack of a truly integrated public transport system. Like, why in the fuck can't I just get on A train and have it ferry me to AWP. A, as in a singular, fucking TRAIN. This can't be that difficult.

Sober sleeping. Wouldn't recommend it.

The problem as I've come to understand it, and I've not read so many substance use narratives but I've asked around enough to the shades who dip into escape's gravity well, is the inimitable boredom of quotidian horseshit. Wake up, dress, work, small talk, moil, drudgery, small talk, home, dinner, diversion, wait to sleep. It's absolute bullshit. Why go through that with full on pain and reality? It's like speed running a video game on legendary difficulty. Dial it back to merely hero and you can actually get some enjoyment out of all the PvP and NPC content. Hell, download yourself a bottle and really amp up the fun buff of your living stats. Sure, I could revel in the utter terror/goodness of watching Uly and A play Chinese checkers while stone cold but why do that when I could do the same twisted? Makes little sense. 2 weeks until the oasis of AWP.

14MAR2019

Blustery day. Proto-spring. Waxwings are about and furiously chittering as they lap from pools of snow and ice melt. Self-worth plummeting; sense of fraud rising. Libido is trash. So many hours to fill.

16MAR2019

Saturday. Loneliest of all days of the week. Normally, I'd wait until noon and amble to the Moosehead for socialization by proxy with all the old drunkards there backslapping and guffawing and pull tabbing and sportsing and bell ringing and all the chintzy and low-rent sparkle-light thrills of the poor. Bottles of top shelf whisky never touched, gathering dust. I'm in the cafe right now, perusing the drama of flesh. I'm aware that Lent is supposed to be a spiritual journey and that none among us can shoulder it alone and therefore the need for supplication to the divine in our period of bodily abjuration but this is missing on the current Lenten adventure. Probably accounts for the difficulty level. Team Sleep, the soundtrack. 

The cafe is all bougie white folks while outside in the hallway a team of Southeast Asian ladies janitor the facilities, stony faced, enduring.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. I do recommend.