97 lines
5.4 KiB
HTML
97 lines
5.4 KiB
HTML
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<title>Zk | 005</title>
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<h1>Zk | 005</h1>
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<article class="content">
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<p>date: 2019-08-10
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weight: 5
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tags:
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- echoes
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- kind
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- snarky
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- earnest
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categories:
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- alcohol</p>
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<hr />
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<p>When 2007 rolled around, I turned 21. <em>What if,</em> I thought to myself. <em>What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?</em></p>
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<p>By that point, alcohol was this nebulous thing. I’d roped a few people into getting me alcohol now and then, and it was fine. I’d started brewing and it was whatever. I had beer and it was alright. I went through a mead phase–</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>You went through several.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>–I went through a wine phase, and an absinthe phase–</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Don’t sell yourself short. You wrote <a href="https://writing.drab-makyo.com/non-fiction/tasting/new-american-absinthe/">an essay on absinthe</a>.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>–and a gin phase. That’s the one that got me. I had a bottle of Beefeater’s, what was to become my gin of choice, and I had an inch of it poured over ice and I was standing in the kitchen. Such a wide open space. The kitchen at that apartment was larger than my bedroom now, and it opened onto a living room the size of what we have now. I was standing tall in that vast plain of a room, staring down into my glass and watching the way the ice melting into the gin created swirls of two different kinds of transparent. I was thinking how it was probably due to the different ways the two liquids refracted light, and then I was laughing, because I was staring down into my drink like something out of a bar.</p>
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<p><em>What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?</em> I thought. I drank every night that week.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Why ruin your life on accident when you can do it on purpose?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I don’t think I was thinking in those terms at that point.</p>
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<p>Are you now?</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Perhaps.</p>
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<p>Maybe you’re just afraid of doing anything by accident.</p>
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<p>Perhaps.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>You’re sounding like me more by the day.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Learn from the best.</p>
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<p>And so you set about with a will.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Like magic. I set forth my will with a stated goal and made it happen. My spell was spoken and washed down with liquor. I drank nearly every day from then on out. I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol over the next ten years. I went through more mead phases and more beer phases. I went through a distillation phase. Magic is empowerment through attention to detail.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>The MEAD principle. Cute.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I drank hard with the choir, and then I left school and drank hard with the programmers. If there’s one thing that most programmers do better than computers, it’s drinking, after all.</p>
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<p>I did some work at a bar, even. Just making <a href="/emb-menu.pdf.html">their menu</a> and website for them in exchange for free drinks.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>You mastered LaTeX that way. A very you thing to do.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I did well at it. I still have one of the menus and some of the paper laying around somewhere. I did that until the bartender left and, when I asked for my next payment from the owner, he flipped out at me and threatened to sue me for impersonating him. I don’t think I realized Raffi, the bar manager who hired me, was already on his way out.</p>
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<p>I drank my way out of one job and through a good chunk of another. I drank until I got better at it than I was at software. I drank myself into burnout. I drank until I collapsed.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>You used up your spell slots. You ran out of will. You had to quit by accident.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I worked to quit, I’ll have you know. It wasn’t easy. It took meds and some rough nights.</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>You were less of a person then than you were when you started drinking. The you who started drinking by focusing on <strong>starting drinking</strong> was more real than the you who collapsed in the kitchen from a PNES and stopped drinking because she was completely empty of intention.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Should I start the daily drinking again, then?</p>
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<p>You’re more of a person now than you were when you started drinking.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>That, coming from you, is a glowing endorsement.</p>
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<p>You may have been more of a person when you started than when you stopped, but you weren’t much of one, even then.</p>
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</blockquote>
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</article>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-05-10</p>
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