Nine years without a drink: The good and the bad

Monday 7/7/25

Ran ten circuits of stairs in the Monument on Saturday and five more on Sunday, and walked three miles Saturday, five on Sunday, and did 100 push-ups each day. No confrontations in or around the Monument. Just friendliness. Was speaking to one of the rangers afterwards on Saturday, and she asked me how many circuits I ran, how many I usually did. I told her I was trying to do 400 circuits in three months, and she said to tell her when the day was and she would bring me a cupcake. Another ranger was acting in a reenactment back down the hill, so I stopped by to tell him he looked good. Three guys standing by the mist shower asked me how many times I'd done it. I said ten, they were a little confused as if I counted each time as a passage in one direction, and I said no, ten times up and ten times down, which prompted one of them to say, "Quads of god," so that was a bit awkward. I didn't know what to say to that. We were all kind of looking at my legs. They weren't in very good shape, and their three very attractive wives were sitting on the nearby bench, saying the word "literally" a lot. I'm at 290 circuits of stairs since May 15. Monument stairs, that is. That past week featured two ten circuit days and three five circuit days. Three of the five circuit days were harder than one of the ten circuit days.

More people, by the way, clicked on that post with the title saying that someone called me a young punk and an asshole because people don't like me, so they're going to want to see that kind of thing more. But if I sucked, if I was less, if I tried less, was stupider, and was a bad person, and of course what now passes for mediocre, people would like me more. Or at all, if one prefers to put it that way. It's funny how it goes with these things, though, isn't it? Says everything about the world, in a way, if you get it.

You know what would draw a lot of clicks? If I said--in a title to a post--that I was drinking and struggling and was in the hospital because of something that happened to my heart because of alcohol.

All of that excited clicking. I know. I get it. I live it, man.

I can't report that though in this entry, which I'm putting here in case there are ever better times, and people who feel the opposite way about me, and want and need the work, the art, and love the person and what they stood for, what they were, and hopefully still do and are. Because I'd much rather all of that happen before I'm dead. And long before it.

But Sunday officially marked 3276 days, or 468 weeks, or nine years, without a drink of alcohol. I put it that way, because I actually stopped drinking in May 2016. But because of how I do this--marking the weeks in this journal after they are completed, or close to it, rather than just going by a single date, which would be anyone else's method--I have miscounted over the years. Is to do, right? I have a rule here: When it's my fault, I pay the price. That's one of the many ways I maintain and develop my sense of accountability. It's my fault, and I should be made to remember that.

Someone said to me on Friday, "Congratulations for making it nine years," and I have to confess that I don't like that kind of thing. I hadn't made it nine years yet--not officially, anyway. And there is very little I'd assume is guaranteed to happen just because of what I'd done in the past. Go out and earn the day. Don't assume the day. Earn the story. Earn the great work of art. Earn the amazing piece. Earn, earn, earn, earn, earn.

What can I say about not drinking? Depending on how you look at it, there are good and bad things. I have no doubt that if I had kept drinking like I did, I'd be dead now. I don't think there's any way I'd be alive. I'm not being dramatic. When would I have died? Well, maybe as early as August of 2016 when I had the pneumonia. I think anyone who sees this journal would know my strength in all areas. I'm not a complainer. What happens to me and what I live with for years, decades, would kill someone stone dead in less than a week. You can't live like this. It's not a thing that humans can do or that any other human could do. Let alone keep going, keep trying, keep creating. Here's a fun fact: I've had a drink more recently than I've had a date. The better you become, the more alone and hated and feared and envied you will be. It's just how it is. The thing is, for most people, that ceiling is pretty low. Their low ceiling protects them. I don't have a ceiling in terms of what I can create, what my mind is able to do, what I may become. That ceiling saves other people. Here, my absence of a ceiling has created a life that is worse than a life in hell. This is worse than hell for me.

I think about the timing of when I stopped drinking. That I may have averted death by just a few months. But had I survived the pneumonia--and I'm sure I would have been in the hospital, rather than just going to the ER a couple times, in one instance with a fever of 107--there's almost surely no way my heart, with the shape it was in and the irregular heartbeat--would have held out over ninety percent of a decade. Not with me doing that to myself.

What I'm going to say would be upsetting to the people who care about me, but 1. I write this journal, in some sense, as though it were a book with a lock upon it that went back into a drawer, though it's much more complicated than that, and also the opposite of that at the same time; again, complex and 2. There really isn't more than like one person who does. That's also just the truth. But I will say this now: There are many times I regret having given up drinking because it could have been all over and I'd be free. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be alive. I only know pain. I get better and better, I have work that is beyond anything that's ever been or will be. I just make more of it. Alone. I fight, I do things requiring a level of courage that people can't conceive of. Every day it is just me. The work sits with me.

There were people in the past who believed in me. My future. One of them is a former professor. And over the years, as he watched me suffer, and he realized what the world really is, there was nothing he could say to me. Because I was the best. It wasn't close. I was honorable. I did what I did, achieved what I did. And what happened was it became too painful to know me. Because what could you say? Keep going? Soldier on? And my situation throws into the least forgiving relief where things are now in this world, with people, society, culture.

Obviously publishing, but publishing is such a small thing, really. There's no room in publishing for a great artist. Publishing is like the condo board. There's the building president, but it doesn't even have anything to do with any of the other buildings on the street, let alone the world. And that's what I'm interested in. And what my work is for. The world. It's not to be in the Hudson Review and the Idaho Review, you know? As the endgame. It's not to be Tommy Orange and have some half-wit frauds lie about my work that they don't even really read so they can stroke themselves in front of each other. And it probably wasn't a conscious decision on this person's part. I'm not singling them out. It's but an example. An idea, further indication, of how things are here. We rarely know why we do what we do. People who are very self-aware do. But how many people are like that? Is anyone now? Do you know how much discipline that takes? And time. No, digging in is easier. Doubling down. Cutting someone else out of the life because they don't toe the official narrative line. The play havoc with it. We love our echo chambers. This is part of the reason why. They save time, energy, effort, ego, pride. And living like you need one/them will kill you fucking dead. But most people are dead in all but name only.

After my wife left, without a word of warning, just gone, I blamed myself for everything. It's my nature. That wasn't good. But what is good, is that I'm open to it. I start with me. Was it something I did? Even with publishing. We see a Marc Peyser, a Bradford Morrow, a Joel Whitney. And even here, I start with me. Because it's essential to me to be a certain kind of person, and that is the best person I can be. I can handle it if I've failed. In 2012, I was open to the possibility that I was the worst man. A horrible, horrible man. A monster.

And I think any truly good person has to be open to that. Bad people aren't. You think David Remnick is? You know better than that. And he's obviously a bad person. A reason people have to be so defensive is simply this: What if it were true? What if that thing about them were true?

What could they do? Start over? Tear themselves and build themselves up from scratch? Think how daunting that is. The time it would take. The effort. The humility. The pain. The shame. You wouldn't feel great about yourself. And you'd feel like everything up until then had been a waste. You'd wasted your life. Because you'd gone the wrong way for so long.

I can face anything about myself. I can do the work. And though I wasn't a bad man, and I blamed myself for things I shouldn't have, I had a lot of work to do. I began doing it that year of 2012. I started walking 3000 miles a year. Real number. I thought and thought and thought and thought. I looked inside myself with a ruthless, relentless focus. And I went on like that until 2016, when I stopped drinking. I walked a lot still--I walk a lot now, and obviously up above I noted those miles; well, there's a reason for that; it's not vanity or to boast about my physical activity; that's not who I am--but I walked less because that's when I started running the stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument.

I've changed so much more over these nine years. This journal most likely never would have been started if I kept drinking. There would be no prose offs. There wouldn't be these truths put out there about publishing. I couldn't do that if I drank. I'd feel vulnerable. I wouldn't have the courage. I was not a Zulu warrior. People think that's some jokey thing I say, and it is is, to a slight degree. It doesn't really mean anything on its own...but here, in my world, in this context, it means a fucking ton. It's a real thing. It's a code. A value system. It's bravery. It's attitude. Endurance. It's being a hero even if everyone hates you. Fears you. It's keeping going. It's standards. God is it standards. It's expecting the best from yourself. It's kindness. Not for show. I mean a kindness that comes from the largest of hearts and the deepest of souls. It's being so human that you're more than what a human could otherwise be. It's I'll keep trying again tomorrow.

Then there are all of the things I wouldn't have written, because I wouldn't have been able to write them. Even if I was alive. What am I talking about? Well, if you're reading this in the summer of 2025, you haven't gotten to see these stories yet, save at most as excerpts. "Fitty," "Best Present Ever" (which I did put up on here in full for now, though having done so gnaws at me every day), "Friendship Bracelet," "Dead Thomas," "Go and Come Back," "Thank You, Human," "The Bird," "Dot," "Big Bob and Little Bob."

They were beyond me. I was doing other things as good, but I wouldn't have written those works. The stories about women and girls and children. Some of them are stories a child could understand, which the smartest person in the world could also think about, as hard as they could, every single day of their lives. Do you know how hard it is to make something like that? It's the hardest thing anyone can ever do. To have something get both smaller and bigger at the same time. To leave no one behind, while being the biggest, most complex thing of all. Because it has the answers. To all of it. To us and why we exist.

But right now, if I hadn't written those things, nothing is any different. The pain it causes me to finish something like "Friendship Bracelet," as I did last month, after working on it for a year and a half, and then it just sits there with me, is a uniquely searing pain. I can send it to a few people I know, and I do and did, but for the most part, they're not going to say anything, for a bunch of reasons. Sometimes it's envy, sometimes it's fear. Intimidation. When people see the best thing they've ever seen, even those who like you will tend to make like you never showed it to them, because they don't know what to say. They think nothing could be good enough. They don't have the words.

They figure you know, because how could you not? It's like getting up close to the sun. You'd be fully aware it was hot. If what you had sucked, well, it's easy for someone to say something they don't mean, isn't it? And that's how it works. That's what most people do and are much more comfortable doing. We just say shit now. We hit that like button, so so speak, even when we're not online. That's what the "writing community" is. It's people being insincere with each other. It's very easy for most people to be insincere. "Great story." You can't do that with the likes of "Friendship Bracelet." So instead, people will say nothing.

Those are the people less against you. Anyone else who sees it--you saw this with a Carolyn Kuebler, or a Michael Ray--will hate you like they can't hate anyone or anything else. Because you can do what they just saw. And you do it constantly. Daily. They'll try and make you pay. And they can, when it's just you, them, the work, and what might as well be a dark room, where no prying eyes can see what's really happening, and nothing gets out. You see why this journal--and entries about people like that--became necessary. How I really had no choice, unless I was okay with that happening to me, and, more importantly, my work.

And even when someone in publishing isn't a horrible, fraudulent, sycophantic person--and best of luck finding that needle in a haystack that might as well be the size of the Midwest--everything defaults to comparables. These people are so conservative, for all of their announced liberal leanings, that they can't do anything if it involves something new. Something that is not a ridiculous retread. What books is this book exactly like? What stories is this story exactly like? Anything new, let alone anything unique, discombobulates them. Reduces them to a puddle. They don't know what to do with something like that. They don't want amazing, unique work unlike any work there's ever been. It's against the rules for them. Forbidden. Because then it's their ass on the line, and they have to think, and they're supposed to be right. Whereas, if it's more of this slop which is more of this slop, and the chain of slop goes back thousands of items, or however many, then it's not on them. It's not on their judgment. People will do just about anything not to think and not to be accountable, and no people more than publishing people, which is really saying something in our world in 2025. I had a publisher--who should be doing anything else--who asked me, "What books are like your book that came out recently?" They didn't even believe anything was like anything I've done. But they couldn't think or be any other way.

You can imagine what it's like to live like this. To be imprisoned by genius. Which it isn't even. The term isn't enough. There have been geniuses. There hasn't been what I am.

Now, if it ever worked out? Well, I'd be very grateful that I stopped drinking when I did, because if I didn't, then this working out of which I speak wouldn't have come to pass. I'd be dead. There'd be a lot of works, sure, but there wouldn't have been a lot of other works.

Anyway, that's where it's at right now, as I start my tenth year since I gave up alcohol.