For What It's Worth

This doesn't matter much, what's about to be stated:  I'm not drinking, and I'm not drunk.

There.  I said it.  Everyone feel better?  It's true.

This little long-abandoned project began as an exercise to see how crazy a person might get when they try to take alcohol out of a life where it had been more or less present continually.  Here's the thing about experiments:  They don't always work.  They almost can't work, if "work" is this thing that someone might have in mind.

Well, a person can go about as crazy as they'd like when no longer under the influence of alcohol.  I'm proof of that, not at all unique.  It's likely little coincidence that once the running came around, my time spent on this little project took a back seat.  It was something to do.  This, this writing about nothing and nowhere, this space in time was something to do.

There's been a little bit of doing in the past few years.  I think that was probably a good thing, overall.  There are bad things that have come down the pipe as well.

It's tempting to go back and delete the nonsense in the past of this space, but that won't be happening soon.  It's there for a reason.  I don't want to go back there.  Here may not be the best place on the planet, but it isn't there.  Now is better than any of my previous thens.

If someone would have asked me the odds that I'd be sober over seven years down the road, I probably would have lost the bet.  Just to prove a point, maybe?  Hard to say.  I was convinced to be done at the time, but had very little confidence for eighteen months about the long-term ability or ramification of such a thing.  The running has been tremendously helpful on this front.

The absense of that running messes up the body and mind every bit as bad as the absense of alcohol.  It is odd, but I guess it shouldn't be surprising at all.  The physiological and psychological benefit of that sort of discipline in training cannot be easily replaced.  It's saved my sobriety, every bit as much as a continued attendance in a little AA.

It's as much society as I can stand.  Still.  I'll go to a ballgame or a concert once in a while, but found that the library isn't the easiest damn place in the world.

It's still tremendously unclear if any attempt will be made to piece in these four years that elapsed.  There's been a lot of movement.  Little settling.  Shifting sands all about, and yes...no true north.

Oh, well.  Gonna have to do for now.