Out with the Booze
I have given up drinking for good, if not for all. ‘Not for all,’ I say, because I can imagine situations wherein a drink or two (but not three) would be worth the cost — a glass of wine at an outdoor dinner with my wife on vacation as the waves roll in the distance, for example, might be worth the effects (to paint the picture: “You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine, While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,” as Robinson Jeffers writes in a poem to his wife). But ninety-nine times of one hundred, the cost will not be worth it, at least not for me.
Not for me — because the plans I have for most days are worthwhile. If the morrow is a weekday, my plans will involve an early wake time, vigorous exercise for over an hour, nine + hours of doing my damndest to manage a mid-size company and to do it well, a serious attempt to be present with my wife and daughter afterwards, and, at the end of the day, if day left there be, reading, writing, or at the very least thinking about some topic in the vein of the whence, whither, and what for of things. The weekends are spent engaged in more of it all, less the work. A drunken night, even a fun one, is not worth the effects of alcohol on that.
The equation is different for plenty of people, though, and that is why drinking even copious amounts of alcohol may well be worth it to them. If one’s plans for the following day involve nothing but Netflix, potato chips, and mindless screen-scrolling themselves into mediocrity, then why not do it hungover?
But I am far too cognizant of the reaper to plan to do nothing, far too aware of the good fortune of good health and capacity for vigorous engagement in life to waste a day of it intentionally contributing to my own decay. Let the cows graze grass and die, but I won’t.
Does that sound pretentious? Probably it does. Probably it would be, if this were not a journal. But at least one point of a journal is to write down rationales of which one can remind oneself when he is tempted to do something he ought not, or when he might back out of something he ought to do, or when he wants to inspire himself to dig deep in difficult times (see Aurelius’ Meditations).
Have you managed a healthy relationship with alcohol wherein no days are wasted? Good on you — and I mean it. A grazing cow you are not. But any more than two drinks can do one in, and I always want three. A passionate man must be more cautious, and for me, that’s abstinence.
