Upon reading an article about whether or not the effects of drinking can be reversed

Saturday 5/30/26

An article popped up on my phone with a headline asking if the effects of drinking could be reversed.

I knew the answer to this question but wanted to see the article nonetheless in case there was something I'd missed or gotten wrong. I'm frequently blown away by people's failure to know the most basic things.

I experience this constantly. Take, for instance, the Grateful Dead. The things that I would have thought don't merit mentioning, because they're the most basic things anyone would know if they know anything about the Dead, are things that so-called Deadheads won't know. Not all of them. But many.

I'm talking the "I just learned that this band existed today and looked them up for the first time" stuff. Same with the Beatles. And these subjects will be that person's main interest in life, or close to it, in terms of what I suppose we'll call hobbies or extracurriculars.

It's as if people make an effort not to know things. That they try to not know what you shouldn't be able to help but know if you have eyes and ears. I can't understand how it's possible to know as little as they do.

Because it seems to me without even trying you'd have to know more than people do simply by being alive and coming in contact with things. So it really is like they're working to not do that. Which they aren't, of course.

Increasingly, we're not able to know anything. Our thick skulls can't be permeated. I find that things I once would have believed myself to not know that much about in comparison to others, or some others--like dietary matters, for instance--are things I know a goodly more about.

As I was drinking, I learned about the effects of drinking. Which is another reason why I knew I needed to stop. I knew, for instance, about the resiliency of the liver. It's about the most resilient of all our organs. That is, up until a point. When you've pushed your liver over a certain line, your liver isn't coming back. But until then, it keeps getting off the mat.

I couldn't access this article. I think it was via Apple. But I searched the question on Google, and found the information via the Mayo Clinic or some reputable place like that. And I'll tell you, reading about the effects of alcohol--more of which is known about since I stopped drinking--is sobering itself.

Frightening stuff. It's really messing you up. And your long-term prognostication. I could see this being rather panic inducing. In my life this is another area in which I must be strong. The bottle represents the end to me. It isn't alone in this, but that's what it would mean. That I can't go on. I am in such a dark place barely hanging on in the going on. Today is worse than this day a year ago. And it was so bad then.

I don't say with brazen surety, "In my former drinking days which are always to be former drinking days..." I don't take a day for granted in this matter. Same as with the Monument. Same as with the work of writing.

Many people focus on the liver when it comes to drinking. They think that's what's most at risk. What your problem is likeliest to be.

And there is that line I mentioned, which, once crossed, is not crossed again back in the more favorable direction. But really it's the heart that is most vulnerable with alcohol. Your risk with basically everything goes up with alcohol. It's quite the interconnected network of potential ill health. Alcohol is this across-the-board booster of negative outcomes. It's a death facilitator. Heart disease, liver failure, all your cancers.

The article I accessed talked about how quitting alcohol can result in heart issues resolving themselves. That is, going away. I wanted to make sure I had gotten "clear," if you will, to date. Sometimes when you stop doing something bad for you, and you stay on that course, it becomes like you never did that thing at all. With other things, not so much. You've improved your health, but what's done was done and it's now this permanent part of your health. To some degree.

We make a choice to improve something about ourselves and we stick to it. But it can still be useful to revisit that decision and why it should have been made. This is hard for me because if I had kept drinking--especially the way I was--I know I'd be dead now.

Instead, I'm healthier, but for what? To suffer more and for longer? I think about how this could all be oven. When instead it's just going to continue to get worse and I am barely making it to the next day as it is, and I'm not assuming I'll get to tomorrow. I think, too, how I could have died of natural causes, and not had to go about killing myself. Finding the way and doing it.

Ah, these are dark thoughts. But that's how it is here. This is the reality, not some mood or funk.

Those symptoms and drawbacks, though, were still chilling to read about. I thought in turn about people who do drink reading these same words. People who wished to live. It'd be very frightening. And, you'd think, hard to continue on in that behavior.

I think very few people look into it at all. I don't think they're curious or that it occurs to them to try and know anything. Include that which is nearest to them, has the biggest impact on them.

Listening to as many classic radio programs as I do, I'm struck again and again by the once nearly universally-held belief that smoking was fine. So many commercials for cigarettes. You'd think smoking was no bigger a health risk than drinking water.

I don't mean because of the prevalence of these ads but rather their attitudes and their reflections of a general attitude. These ads weren't at odds with medical advice, either. The doctors were smoking right along with everyone else and didn't think they were taking their chances either.

You would have been a dissenting voice if you said, "No, man, that stuff will kill you." General medical literature--a pamphlet in a doctor's office--didn't exist to inform you.

But we do have that literature for the likes of alcohol now. It seems, too, like much more has been learned in recent years. I'll check to see if there's something I missed or should know. Perhaps something newly discovered. Were I have read that such and such a thing can't be overcome, sorry, too bad, you did it, after all, I'd wish to see if I seemingly had anyway or could.

This isn't scientific, I grant, but humans can do amazing things, in theory, with singular commitment, resolve, strength, skill, whatever the case may be, and that includes in terms of science. We hear these stories of people expected to live only another year and yet there they are, a quarter of a century later.

The truth is that on May 30, the year of our Lord 2026, I am alive. I am not, on this day, trying just to be here. I am, as of this moment, here with the understanding and for the purpose of still trying to do these things I'm trying to do. That is my here. If I'm here, that's why.

It is like checking that article for confirmation of what I thought I knew. Yes, you are here, so that must mean...