Drunk

 

It’s been a while since I could write that in a journal entry. I’ve been, with the exception of a scant few outings with friends over the past couple of years, where I’ve thrown a few glasses of wine down, looking at J, trying to decide if she can tell I’m trying to get trashed, hoping she can’t, confident in my abilities to get us home, driving, even if I’m kind of on the edge of inebriation. More or less sober for two plus years. Sober in the sense that even if I’m drinking it’s one or two drinks and done.

Being with Jennie — since we bought the house 2 years ago — have been the driest of my adult life.

But it’s Saturday night now and J is out with her friend J2 and I threw a full bottle of cheap white wine down over the course of a single hour while I worked on the basement project, wherein I am trying to turn a big unfinished area into an exercise room.

Walls, check. Painted from slab gray to a light yellow, almost white, a concrete paint, breathable so when it’s raining the moisture comes through the cement instead of building up in the concrete and resulting in the long-term breakdown of molecules that results in Efflorescence and the weakening of the house’s foundation.

Electric, check. I put an outlet on each unfinished wall, electrical boxes with GFCI outlets bound to concrete, connected to one another with grounded metal conduit. New ceiling lights, bright hemispheres bulging from above that properly illuminate the room, replacing the single light-bulb prison-style fixtures that used to be there.

I’ve been trying to check the box on the ceiling. When I started months ago, it was joists and pink insulation batts above. Ugly and gross. I’ve been cutting rectangles out of drywall and mounting them between the joists. Slow going. A lot of measuring, drilling, mounting. I listen to music as I work — mostly Porcupine Tree, Pineapple Thief, Metalocalypse, Candlemass, Peter Gabriel.

Today I finished hiding the insulation behind the drywall on the ceiling and started to fill in the gaps here and there to finish the ceiling. Filling gaps is a combination of plaster and caulk, depending on the shape and size of the gap. I am trying to make the ceiling look smooth and consistent without quite being so anal that I lose my mind over imperfections. I squirt caulk from a gun between drywall and joists and use my finger to press the compound into the joining areas to seal the seams shut. I do this over and over and over again.

Tonight I am listening to Pineapple Thief’s album Dissolution. It is an album about, as best I can tell, a breakup. The lead singer must have broken up with a long-time girlfriend. His primary beef seems to be about the public nature of the split. Back in my day, when you broke up with somebody, in 1995 or so, it was kind of a secret until you started telling people. Nowadays, the breakee or the breaker can post on facebook that’s it’s over: So and so dumped me. It seems that’s what she did to this guy, and it broke him. He was already depressed about losing her, and then the social media attacks did him in.

My world is caving in.
The whole world is looking in.
They tell me.
What is wrong.
With me.

I like the album because I’ve been fascinated by the changes that technology brings to relationships and social life. It’s not been all that great. I remember breaking up with my long time girlfriend of 15+ years and the hurt of her telling her family that I was a shithead and me being powerless to fight it. But, she wasn’t fucking me anymore! I wanted to say. I am basically her slave around the house – I cook, I do 80% of the cleaning, 100% of the landscaping, I earn as much as her, I manage the finances, I do the lion’s share of everything.

It didn’t matter. She controlled the narrative.

I imagine how much worse it could have been if she felt like posting all of her opinions and attitudes to facebook. It was a fear of mine at the time, that she would air dirty laundry for all the world to see. Three sides to every story: Hers, hers, and hers.

I sing along as I mix powder into plaster in my basement, plaster that will allow me to patch the bigger gaps in the ceiling, gaps that caulk won’t cover. I am alone on a Saturday night. I sing and I think about how glad I am to have left her, despite all of my fears. Globs of plaster fall on my shirt, on the stepstool I am using to get high enough to cram gunk into the ceiling, on the floor. I don’t care. I am making progress and I will clean up the mess later.

I think about all of the drugs I’ve done today. Nothing hard, no. But I’m taking things that make my brain more alert. Adrafinil. Pseudoephedrine. Caffeine. Bacopa. Then I douse everything in alcohol and work.

You couldn’t see. Anyone.
Least of all me.

I wonder how much my ex really saw me or cared about me. Not much, those last years. She knew I was a bitch, knew I would do what she wanted nine times out of ten. I would see her family, she would refuse to see mine.

I wonder why I am such a bitch myself. I don’t know why I am. I’m not horrible looking, not fat, not a complete loser, have a job, have some status.

But I’m a bitch. I think about earlier in the day. My wife sees the neighbor’s dog run into the back yard. He stops and takes a dump, dead center, squatting and straining, looking directly toward the window where we peer at him. It’s as though he’s challenging us to run out and stop him from producing a giant turd right on our property.

J tells me I have to do something about this. It’s the third turd this month.

The second one, I picked up from the ground with a paper towel and put it next to their garbage can on the ground. I am 100% certain they saw this and knew I put it there.

The first one I put right on the border of our property with a little flag sticking out of it — the sort of plastic flag you see on a lawn that’s been recently fertilized, a black plastic stick with a yellow rectangle. I planted the flag right in the center of the log, drove it into the ground, and walked away. It was gone the day after.

After the second one, I saw my neighbor D outside one day while I was mowing the lawn and she stopped me and apologized. So they 100% got my message. I said hey, don’t worry about it, I would have stopped by to talk about it but both times it looked like nobody was home and I didn’t want to just let it go— I just wanted you to be aware your dog was pooping in my yard.

She told me that she would keep an eye on it and apologized again.

So this one, the third one, the one that happened today, the turd so fresh it’s practically still steaming out in the yard, requires action.

I am wearing a wife beater because that’s what I have on when I’m doing work in the basement and there are stains on it and plaster and I look like hell and I just don’t care.

The husband is home. Adam. I don’t know him that well. He’s mid fifties, gray hair, somewhere around my height at 5’11, Irish looking, pink skin. I say hey, got a sec.

Sure

Sorry to bother you but your dog left a present in my back yard. I’m hoping you can take care of it.

Huh?

Your dog.

Yeah

Your dog took a dump in my back yard just now.

Oh! Oh, okay. Well. That’s not great.

Yeah, it’s not great. Can you clean it up.

To his credit he doesn’t hesitate but he also gives me this look that is a little like why the fuck are you bothering me and I wonder if he thinks I am a colossal bitch.

We walk over to the turd and he’s got plastic gloves on and he removes it and he says something about the electric fence not working that well and they’ll look into it.

I say something like yeah that’s great you should do that and you know, my big concern is actually the time that your dog poops that I don’t notice it

And he’s like whaddaya mean

And I say well if I don’t notice it I will wind up stepping in it while mowing the lawn or something and I’ll track it inside my house and my wife will get really pissed off and then I’ll get pissed off too and then I’ll be coming over to your place to talk about this and I won’t be in such a good mood as I was today

He looks at me like I am the fucking devil. Like I am escalating things for no reason.

Then I add: I like being good neighbors. Let’s continue to be good neighbors.

He walks back to his house with the dog’s turd in his plastic gloved covered hands and I feel like a complete fucking asshole, I don’t even know why I said the things I said, I feel like another person said them.

I am awkward, I think to myself. I am terrible with social situations. I don’t know how to just be nice, be social, have friends. There is something wrong and damaged inside of me. It seems to me that I behave like the principal in a school instead of a regular guy trying to be friendly. I want to be friendly but I don’t know how. There are a million other things I could have said. I hear you play guitar sometimes, you are pretty good. Or your kids seem really great. Anything other than let’s continue to be good neighbors. That sounds like a threat.

But maybe that’s what I wanted. Maybe I wanted to sound threatening, so that he’d actually do something about his dog.

I don’t know.

After this my wife J goes out to spend time with her friend J2 on a Saturday night and I work on my basement and think about a breakup that happened six years ago, worry about how I handled a confrontation with a neighbor whose dog shit on my lawn. This is, approximately, when I started drinking. When I started layering alcohol on top of pseudoephedrine, caffeine, nootropics.

I wish it didn’t feel good, but it does. Things loosen in me. Things seem to make sense. I don’t feel like I’m such a fucking loser. After Pineapple Thief I put on heavy metal and it does nothing for me.

This is something that’s happened to me in the past year. I used to love heavy metal — my entire life I’ve loved it — but I no longer get much of a kick out of it. Now I want to listen to slower paced progressive rock — I want to listen to depressive stuff. Middle aged whining men bitching about consumerism and lost loves and unselfing.

I think boring thoughts: I need to get another bunch of caulk from home depot. I could probably use a full case, get the 10% bulk discount.

I wonder why I haven’t responded to my friend R’s email in over a week. I wonder why I’m not doing more for my mother who is sick. I wonder how J is doing tonight, out with her friend, somewhere in Boston, watching a movie about lesbians that she wasn’t sure she wanted to see.

I saw my therapist yesterday. I spoke for an hour about the various things going on in my life and then declared I’m completely fine, I’m just busy, there’s just a lot of stuff always going on. This was at the very end of the session.

What about meaning? He asked me. When you started these sessions with me, you were worried about meaning in your life. Worried you were losing track of yourself. Worried you weren’t spending any time on your own interests and hobbies. Is that all solved?

You know it’s not, I told him.

So what’s changed, he asked.

What’s changed is that I’ve given up on having a Me.