21 years

I remember looking forward to drinking legally. 21 years of age was being an adult. Celebrating being an adult was going into a pub and ordering a beer without fear.  Drinking legally was being a man.

Then the provinces of Canada between 1968 to 1970  dropped the legal age of drinking from 21 to 18 or 19.  I felt short changed. I had sneaked into bars mostly to hear bands and be with older friends in bands but somehow when the age changed it meant that the ‘rite of passage’ somehow changed with it.  I developed a resentment.  One day I was drinking illegally, next legally, but what I’d missed is that great 21 year old party bash.  Life wasn’t fair. 

Now I’m 21 again.  Old enough to drink in my own era of thought. Ironically 21 now is the number of years I’ve not drunk. I could drink today too but I choose not to. Today like most days I pray I won’t. 

It’s a long fast.  It’s a sacrifice of the first born most desired pleasure for greater joy here and in heaven. It’s not drinking really I feel this way about but smoking. I miss smoking.  I felt a man when I had a pipe or cigar in my mouth more than when I had a pint. Indeed I quit drinking as much to quit smoking as for any reason. I was addicted to smoking and had quit three times each time starting again while I was drinking.  In retrospect I saw that most of the really rotten things I had in my life were somehow related to the drinking and the way it effected my judgment at the time or for days after. 

The last time I quit both. Smoking was bad and even evil in my mind by then, drinking not so bad.  Man was never meant to inhale smoke of any kind. We were not born with chimneys. I kidded myself the menthol was good for me. I even thought pot was good, because it was a ‘herb’ but while I could have eaten cookies or made tea I instead smoked that too. I even hot knifed hash in the east.  Hash was an east coast thing. Marijuana was a west coast thing.  Crystal meth used to be a European thing while Cocaine and crack dominated the west. Now it’s all fentanyl. I consider myself lucky I got out before cocaine and crack and crystal meth and heroin and fentanyl became prevalent. 

I think with some humility and gratitude that if I’d not quit smoking I might well have smoked crack.  Today I’d smoke fentanyl.  So many dead There but for the grace of God go I. 

I don’t miss the feeling of swimming vision, spinning rooms, the ‘not caring’ how people perceived me as I was a happy fool drinking. I don’t miss brushing people off.  Smoking I was interested in the inhaling and exhaling like a pranayama guru would be with air. But I didn’t appreciate the air and I didn’t appreciate the water. I liked them corrupted then.  Today I’m thankful for breathing. I breathe some days like it’s the best thing in the world. I’ll catch myself not breathing or shallow breathing and take a great big breath smelling the scents and fragrances and thanking my lucky stars to be alive. I love clear spring water alone, love feeling the coolness in my throat, enlivened rather than depressed.  Alcohol is a depressant. 

We say luck is God acting anonymously. I really feel lucky or rather loved by God, just to be alive when I consider where it could have gone.  We’re to celebrate God with ‘praise and thanksgiving’.  We become closer to God with fasting.  Sacrifices were not of the throw away kind but of the best. Hence the story of the man who was going to give up his child and was told not to. By contrast to the Biblical tradition other religions of a more barbaric age were sacrificing their children for prosperity.  There’s a difference between giving old used socks or new socks as a gift to someone. I get that.  

A pastoral friend commented on my life and wondered if giving up alcohol would be good for him. I had to tell him that for him he’d have to give up money. I could tell he didn’t like smoking or drinking but he really got excited around money.  Getting sober didn’t mean I gained a whole lot of subtlety or sensitivity.  I felt for a moment after my reply my friend was going to hit me.  

There’s an idea of ‘attachment’.   What attaches us to the physical or lower plane versus the world of thought, love and soul. Fasting reminds me that I’m a ‘spiritual being living in a material body’ rather than a ‘material being in a spiritual body’.

It was also clear to me that while smoking was physically unhealthy alcohol and those I drank alcohol with were no longer  people who helped me be the best person I could be. That’s what true friends are. Increasingly my drinking buddies were just that.  It had begun as fun.  We were living a great life when we were teenagers and couldn’t drink.  I didn’t smoke as a teen either.  I loved the athletics and scholarship, the music, and fellowship. The coffeehouses really were a blast. I still love coffee. But alcohol creeped into the scene.  At first it was a little something that was added to the already great event, the champagne with the celebration. Then I remember not wanting to stay at a dance because there was no booze. I loved to dance but finally dancing without alcohol didn’t seem as much fun.  Then everything I was doing socially and recreationally was associated with alcohol.  I even stopped to get a pack of cigarettes for after sex.  

I wasn’t alone.  It was the society I lived in.  Teaching at the university I was just one of the gang. I didn’t drink more or less than the next guy yet I had this whole moral thing going on. I was meditating and praying. I’d been attending church since I was a kid. I really believed in this idea of choosing between walking upright or slithering on the ground.  Sometimes drinking I really was legless.  Smoking is simply a death cult thing. It’s not life giving or life enhancing but self destructive, slow suicide. 

It seemed to that so many of my friends who had children changed. I didn’t drink more than a couple of drinks on call. I was on call 24/7 for a decade in a row. So I was what was called the ‘binge drinker’.  I’d get drunk on holidays. Studying I’d hardly drink until after the exams when I’d get thoroughly gassed.  People would comment on my dancing on tables but I danced on tables more sober than I ever did drunk. I was a dancer.  I had drunken friends who never danced, academic Ichabod Cranes, who’d try to dance on tables when we were drinking, monkey see, monkey do but they’d fall and I wouldn’t. 

 Often I thought that I was giving other people a ‘handicap’ by being a little drunk and stoned.  Not blatto but definitely one kite to the wind.  I’d think then that you probably shouldn’t drink, being stupid, or whatever, but you should thank me for drinking and giving you a chance to appear intelligent or athletic.  Only when I was drinking would I perceive myself in ‘competition’ without others. Sober I saw myself in competition with myself and my last achievement but drinking I’d compare.  There’s a special kind of egotism with drinking. I identified. I really was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex when I drank.  Sober, no.  When I smoked dope I just sat in the corner and stared a lot.  I liked music more stoned.  I was a slow lover and even fell asleep and had a partner fall asleep. Not quite like the movies. 

I took up knotting to have something to do with my hands. Smoking a pipe had to be a whole lot about the rituals and stopped me from biting my fingernails. I bite my fingernails again now.  But smoking caused me to wheeze. I also lost some of my sense of smell and taste. It’s always amuses me to hear smokers and drinkers going on about palate and taste, like blind men talking about the movie. Drinking does a lot of tissue damage, of the liver for sure, but also the heart and eventually is a serious cause of dementia. 

Quitting smoking the first thing I noticed was all the smells. I coughed up a bunch of lung for weeks then I breathed like a child again. St. Francis called his body, Brother Ass or Brother Donkey. Well when you give up smoking your body is happy.  I remember the first time I booked a motel room and didn’t ask for not smoking and was literally assailed by the stink and reek of old tobacco.  I smelt like that.  I smell the old men and women who are homeless but have enough money to smoke. They smell like ash trays. But just like me, they don’t know it. And I was wearing a Brook Brothers suit and fine cotton shirt, reeking.

Drinking I was losing a lot of time.  One or two glasses of wine are fine but when I got to three or four I wasn’t really at the top of my game. It’s why we don’t want pilots to be drunk and why Frank Zappa didn’t want people drunk or stoned in the studio. It’s non productive time.  I found when I stopped drinking I suddenly had a whole bunch more creative and useful time on my hands. I also found that I really didn’t like hanging around the conversations that went on when people got to drinking. I hate to use the word boring but that pretty much sums up what I thought pretty soon after.  Suddenly I was taking courses at the university after work, working out and writing seriously again.  I was reading a whole level higher of books. I always read but once again I was reading scientific texts, ancient tombs and studying other languages to appreciate translations.  

It all could have gone the other way.  There but for the grace of God go I.  These years have been good, exciting, interesting, useful, good friendship, wonderful dogs and memorable. I don’t forget like I used to.  My memories have a crispness and colour where as I remember them diluted and blurry.  No wonder we joke if you remember the 60’s and 70’s you probably weren’t there.

I’m here today. 21 years later. I love the learning and the friends.  It’s been a journey. I don’t think I’ll drink or smoke today. It’s hard not to some days with the government pushers working overtime.  I liked when a guy asked what is the difference between the government and any other gang. The answer was they’re not into selling children for sex, yet. Small mercies. They’re head over heels into pushing cigarettes, alcohol, gambling and now drugs.  

I was vulnerable as a young man.  My family was good, really good. Hard working,  law abiding, church going. They didn’t drink or smoke. Nothing they taught me was anything but good when I look back. Wise and fun.  I just had this anti authority thing going.  I didn’t know it then but I was afraid.  Everyone said the world was going to end.  Nuclear war, Silent Spring, Ozone Layer, Millenial Computer Crash.  It was just constant and if the world was going to end then ‘shananananana live for today.’  Be happy.  Get drunk. Party.  Carpe Diem. That bar at the end of the universe. 

But the world didn’t end.  And all around people were making families and building lives and those that drank and did drugs weren’t. I was fortunate. I got off the downhill spiral real early.  I remember being called a ‘high bottom’ and thinking these guy inviting me to join them were gay.  But by then I’d figured out that the elevator only went up or down , live or die, and I had to get off the down elevator. My partner had got hooked on coke and wouldn’t get help.  I thought I just loved the wild ones and bad ones but later learned that I had come to prefer ‘lower companions’ because it was a cheap way of making myself look good.  I’d moved away from the stirling friends, those I admired most. I’d been blessed to have the finest associations but one day I looked up and was surrounded by people who might be academics but they were drinking academics, they might be sailors, but they were the drinking sailors.  Suddenly the commonality of association was no longer the ‘best’, a true ‘meritocracy’ but rather a ‘tribal’ association.  Today I like to think my associations are the best and some even smoke or drink but no more than moderately or occasionally.  

I stil have some friends from that era too.  I like the ones who got off the merry go round.  I regained friends from before and I’ve made such very good friends since.  I’ll forever miss George and his poetry and stories.  We often laughed going to churches, dinners and meetings together, how we’d never have met if we’d not gone to the ‘bad boys’ club.  

I really am blessed.  So much is perception.  I’ve been able to study the mind and help people whose lives were in knots and who were on the verge of killing themselves. I think of ‘straightening paths’.  I’ve been able to reduce suffering and comfort people and restore people to work and family with the help of my training, my teachers and God.  It’s been a wonderful journey. I’m situated where I’ve been able to to help hundreds of people get out of the hole they dug from themselves and go off to find a new direction.  I think a lot about my parents and family and feel that in their eyes and the eyes of friends and even my dog and the cat I’m okay today.  I didn’t feel good about myself back then even though to the external world I was riding high, outwardly a true success story. Inwardly it was a different story.  

I never imagined I’d be here this long. I didn’t think I’d live this long. I’m thankful I am.  Now I could have a drink especially at my age, but really I don’t think I will. It’s like the apple in the garden. I’ve tasted it.  But I don’t want any more.  I can have anything else in the garden, even the apple but not both.  I could have a smoke too but why.  It does no good.   Truthfully, now,  I just want to walk with my Father.