Day 20: halfway hallmark

 

Status: Today is the halfway mark of Succulent Sobriety 2. As of 11 am Saturday February 1st I have gone twenty days sans cracking open the foamy nozzle of a cold beer. I have gone twenty days without fingering a lighter and firing up a tobacco-laced product. I have gone twenty days without hearing the nasal shrill of a coffee grinder poleaxing oily tears into sandy dust awaiting to be brewed and, duly, sipped, slammed, all being right with the world with every succulent sip. I have gone twenty days without ingesting meat or dairy products. I have fallen in love with my friend’s peanut butter tofu meets rice noodle dish. About a decade ago I wouldn’t touch Tofu with a metric stick.

Now it’s honestly not that bad.

 

Physiology: In the almost three weeks since I started SS2 I have lost 18 pounds. I have learned the joy of slicing produce into wafer sized tithes before drilling them into my juicer (this morning’s concoction: Pomegranates, red grapes, green apple, cucumber,baby carrots, tomato, radish, garlic). I have been surrounded by vats of bacon and gravy and eggs, as well as pizza and have chosen to abstain, where three weeks earlier I would dive in and endlessly gorge. I have  (more than I can spill into the horizontal zipper of a sentence) missed the cognizant punt of mental alertness caffeine seemingly avails. I have augmented my perennial disdain for decaf, which has become more abhorrent as I reach the intermediate mark.

The two most salient aspect of my anatomy is that my heart no longer feels like it is incessantly  thumping like an agitated beater in a  kick drum. The other is that I am bored all the time. Ennui, wading in a frozen pond of tedium.

Although I do enjoy smoking and those that hang with me on a contingent basis know that they hardly ever see me milking a metaphor without a plume of cigar  (or more recently, my pipe) wafting around my head in a dissipating carousel of fumes, smoking has honestly been the easiest to give up. Perhaps the need for coffee and alcohol has completely negated the urge to fire one up.

 Also I miss beer.  But most of all caffeine. Spent all morning trying to write. Occasionally I would delve my nose into the plastic bin of Folgers my roommate has stowed in the freezer and gratuitously inhale. Sometimes I just feel like a discourse in poetic paralysis. Sometimes I can't move. Looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for an hour and wondered what was going on in my life (between reading Gogol and Patrick White). Drank a cup of Keurig Decaf and it tasted like a Possum contracted leprosy, inched into the oval between the bridge of my nose and the bottom of my chin, vomited on the carpet of my tongue and died. 
 
If I wanted to I could go out and brew a pot of coffee and crack open a beer and get loaded and all would be right in the world. I'm embarking on this sojourn because I want growth. Because I'm fucking sick of feeling like a overworked enervated failure. Because I'm sick of never having money. I'm sick of dry humping the hell out of the soil of the past. Because I want to discern certain tautologies about what it means to be a fucking sentient human being vs. the acronymic glyph in a text message.  To feel. To long. To jettison manacles from the past.

To grow.

And, in two weeks, to drive in the country with my dear friend with smokes and a cup of coffee, and (after 40 days) a cheeseburger, crack open an beer and somehow, life will all be good once again...