" 'Get away from me.' That's what it's like. "

When I was very young, I learned that intelligence was currency. Like money, there was just as likely a chance of someone hating you for having it as there was just a likely a chance of someone loving it in the hopes that you'd share it with them. Sometime around ten years old, it took a sharp turn towards the former and suddenly I found myself wishing I wasn't so damn smart.

Definitely the wrong line of thinking.

I've been spending a lot of time wondering where it all started, wondering where I began to need it, wondering where I began to form my life around a habit. There's a romance to alcoholism. A certain hopelessness and nobility in pursuing the wrong way to the bitter (if you're drinking anything that counts) end. It's the stuff of cowboys, Johnny Cash, pavement, lust, damnation, darkness, emptiness, honor, and masculinity. It's stupid for all the right reasons, if there are any for being stupid.

I've been talking to some people about going to meetings, getting into a program, basically starting over from scratch. And it's that last part that gets me - I don't have any friends that never drink. It would be a decision that would catapault me, hopefully temporarily, into even more acute loneliness.

I started drinking to get away from that, so I guess your average asshole would call that poetic justice. It helped make me less weird, or at least as weird as everyone else. It helped me get laid and feed whatever libido survived two decades of being ignored or being passed-over for sunnier and more handsome opportunities. Then, over time, I began to feel like a person and yet, somehow at the same time, like a shell of a person.

People don't really know me, they know my public face. The few people who I have actually thought did "get" me are scattered to the winds. They've taken jobs in other cities, gotten married, had kids, gone to grad school, changed jobs, left town, wrote me off - added themselves to the long list of things that passed me by while I slept in a whiskey cocoon.

I don't know what the solution is, but the problem hurts. It's a pain that doubles in intensity everyday. I'm angry at the circumstances, upset at the corner I'm backed into, disappointed in myself, bitter that I didn't get lucky along the way, resentful that everyone else has it so good for doing so little - I'm severely depressed but for the first time I'm just disgusted with the world that It and Me conspired with Whoever to make me feel this way again. This isn't the first time, but it's definitely the worst. 

:doug @ 9:30 PM