Unauthorized Autobiography (prt. 1)

I don’t want to die.  

I’m not supposed to be a drunk; I’m writing this against my will.  Nobody wants to divulge all of the sorted little details of their life for general consumption.  In as such, this is done under protest and I am not authorizing the following account to be written and/or read  (Besides, I don’t see it as being all that exciting). According to my sponsor and steps #4, #8, and #10, I must “make a searching and fearless moral inventory”, make “a list of all the persons I have harmed”, and “continue to take personal inventory” if I want to avoid relapse and live to see retirement. (sigh)... great.  

BEWARE ALL YE WHO ENTER IN!  Turn back!  Read on at your own peril...

  

I didn’t want to admit to being an alcoholic.  ‘Alcoholic’ has such a negative connotation.  It brings to mind images of a dirty vagrant, passed out under a freeway overpass, clutching the remnants of a half-drunk bottle of Boonesfarm.  Many drunks are reduced to that point.  Many aren’t... the lucky ones.  I wasn’t a gutter bum.  Nor did I drink alone in a dark room, staring at the wall, praying for the peace that death would bring.  

I did, however, drink a LOT... and I liked it.  Perhaps, I think, too much.  I didn’t want to quit drinking but I didn’t want to die.  I would have died had I stayed the course, and it would have been an all too premature (and grizzly) demise.  Truth told, I was in recovery for 6 months before I was fully able to admit to myself that I was indeed an... (gulp) ALCOHOLIC! (shiver) 

I have been an addict from the gate, in one form or another.  Getting loaded runs in my family like a diarrheic nightmare, but it wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  

I was raised in a solid religious family.  My parents were fantastic members of society, upstanding caretakers, and brilliant parents.  They took constant and precise care, placing the necessary roadblocks while mapping out detours in order for me to avoid incomprehensible demoralization.  One problem:  The road to degradation was so enticing, so exciting, and so forbidden that the temptation could simply not be resisted (even at the risk of sprouting ears and a tail). Alas, the road to full-blown jackassosity beckoned.  Unfortunately, I was far less literate than most when it came to reading that particular road map (the "road less traveled" for good reason).  

I remember hearing somewhere that I had a great, great uncle, or something-or-other, who fell off of his horse and broke his neck.  He didn’t lose his bearings while jumping a felled tree during a foxhunt, nor was he knocked from his saddle during a duel in defense of a fair maiden.  It was nothing quiet so valiant.  He was just riding home from the pub one evening, had too much to drink, lost his balance, and fell out of the saddle snapping his neck like a dry twig.  I doubt that the horse was even moving.  Sad.  More recently, my Grandfather and Aunt succumbed to the drunkard’s poison – both died of liver disease.  The former, cirrhosis.  The latter, cancer.  

Just another blaring signpost that I chose to ignore while paving my less-traveled road to a journey of aforementioned degradation, incomprehensible demoralization, alienation, tribulation, fornication, self-detestation and mutilation, [a lot of] regurgitation, trepidation, deforestation (well... maybe not), fixation, dehydration, humiliation, and damnation, until ultimately arriving at my final destination... reformation.