Ten years without a drink

Monday 7/6/26

The heat finally broke on Sunday. My sleep schedule is all disordered. I've been falling asleep at times when I'd normally be waking up to start the day. The heat was the main cause, coupled with the Melatonin matter I detailed earlier. I've seen the Red Sox' recent late-starting West Coast games in full (almost).

Yesterday wasn't exactly a harbinger of autumn. It was still 80 degrees. But after the prior several days, it felt like a relief. You could be outside and move around again. Whereas, the day before, I was sweating just walking the block and a half to Starbucks on Atlantic Avenue. The air was like these tongues of fire lapping against you. Unbearable.

I took myself to Charlestown where I ran five circuits in the Bunker Hill Monument. I came in with a big number in mind, but I've regressed a bit with the days away. A combination of that and what was still summer heat and air. There's a big difference between doing stairs at 80 degrees and doing them at 63. You're compromised with the former. You don't have as much control as you'd like. You're impacted by this other factor, this thing in addition to where your legs and your lungs are at. I feel like if it were 63 degrees I'd be happier with my Monument efforts, but I don't know that for sure.

Having completed my five circuits, I began heading back to Boston, but slowly, thinking this wasn't good enough and I really should go back. I started back a couple times, then turned around again, until finally continuing on back up the hill and into the Monument for a second time on the day, where I did five more circuits. One of those cases of me inevitably being me. Loads of sweat. Again, the summer air. But I did ten circuits in total yesterday, which brought my total since 3/11/26 to 400 Monument circuits. One can see, with me being at 395, how I would have preferred the nice, round number instead.

I guess the notable bit of news from yesterday was that it marked 3640 days, or 520 weeks, or ten years, without a drink of alcohol for me. A truly bad person I've known since the late 1990s whom I counted on and who betrayed me time and time again has been the biggest test to maintaining this abstinence over the past year. There have been occasions where a bottle is in front of me. After everything I've been through, everything my life is, this was something to push me over any number of edges, including this one, what this person has done to me, with the totality of the betrayal, what are thousands of lies, and no accountability, a person I relied on, this was that piece of straw you hear about. The thing I couldn't afford to have happen to me least of all.

Nonetheless, I'm here today, as in alive. For this minute as I type these words. I can't guarantee later on. But I'm here now. This urge comes over me...it's so strong...to just do it. I could see myself not planning in a given minute to kill myself, and then being dead moments after. Just jump off the diving board. I'm also not drinking as of right now.

I've gone through this numerous times before, but yesterday wasn't the "for real" ten year anniversary, but rather the "you messed up counting off these weeks" anniversary, which is what I count as the official anniversary. It was either in April or May 2016 that I stopped drinking. It certainly wasn't July. And last year I believe the anniversary was back in June (I believe), but I have no need nor does it do me any good to look that up and see those words in this record for that day. Because nothing would have changed save for it to keep getting worse. I count by the week, and, as one would know, track this by the week in these pages, rather than simply having an anniversary date because I have to engineer little things like that to try and keep myself going/alive.

These very short term goals, as nothing else, longer term, is ever going to work out in what is worse than hell would be for me. Living this life, my life, is worse than being in hell. If all of the agents of the worlds beyond this one got together and said, "Okay, knowing this guy as we do, and him being what he is, how do we tailor an existence for him that would hurt more than any other could?" If I wasn't the strongest person there's ever been, I'd have killed myself a long time ago. My strength is part of what's a curse. My ability. All of it.

But that spring 2016 date--whatever that date may be--is important, or something I think about often, because if I hadn't stopped drinking when I did, I know that I would have died in August 2016 with the pneumonia and the 107 degree temperature. There's just no way a man who was drinking twenty to thirty units of alcohol a day over a long period of time who had heart issues would have survived that. But in those months, I'd had time enough to get strong. Not strong like I am now, but I had a serious bounce back with my heart health. That saved my life that summer. Which I don't look at as a good thing. How could I?

In many ways, I'm like someone who ought to be dead who is still here. Like a living ghost. Or like dead Thomas. I never imagined when I was first writing that story, or in all the time I've been working on it since--and it's still not fully, officially done--that I'd come to see such a connection, but as I go on like this, as I'm dead in all of these different ways, while being more alive, too, than a human has ever been, for this I know, and this journal bears out, and certainly the work, which the evil people of an evil industry won't let the world see, which the world probably wouldn't look at anyway, because that is the world, unless it changes, which is really, as much as anything, what I've been trying to do, and what my work is for, it's clearer and clearer to the point of an almost supernal transparency. "Dead Thomas" isn't even most about dead Thomas. If you ever got to see the thing, though, you, person who may be reading these words...you'd just think it was the greatest thing there'd ever been. You wouldn't be able to believe that someone could do that. That it was humanly possible. But I digress...

What can I say about these ten years? Nothing good as pertains to not drinking. I'd be dead if I hadn't stopped. Is it better that I'm alive? Why? To suffer more? People hate me more because of this thing I've done. To be able to quit drinking like I did, with my life being nothing but pain, no love, constant discrimination, thousands of people hating me, blocking me, wishing me dead, no friends, in this apartment, nothing to live for, envied, feared, shunned...is unthinkable. To do it in that situation, which has only worsened and worsened...to do it alone. To do it through nothing but will power. No meetings, no sponsors. Not even credit from the few people I do know, who in many ways don't know me at all. They think, "It's this god-like person, he can do anything." Like it's easy for me.

Am I proud of having done this? No. I'm not really proud of anything. I expect things of myself. "Mouse" I may be proud of.

I posted something about this on Threads yesterday. The ten years. All of eight people hit that like button. Again, because it's me. People would prefer to see me fail and be less than what I am and unable to do what I do and create what I create (look at publishing). The public demands an average man, said Thoreau. It despises a person of greatness, especially one of absolute greatness. So it goes. If I was a woman who'd bragged about not drinking for a weekend, you know how that would go. But it takes only a sentence from me to know how different I am, never mind if you know more, read more. This has been another reason for people to loathe, envy, fear me, and discriminate against me.

There's been no benefit to not drinking, unless you want to count my health, which would only matter if things ever changed for me and I wasn't in this position and the things I said above were no longer true. That will never happen. Or, put another way, there is nothing in the entire world, nothing my imagination can create, that I can conceive of being less likely to happen. But I've done it anyway, as if...just in case. Or like that's what I'm still getting up and working for regardless.