I have come to regard my booze-hound years as a perfect storm of sorts. I had a job that spread like a terminal disease. I bought a house without really thinking about it. My job got moved to a hideous suburb, so I began to spend, on average, two hours a day on the highways. My job metastasized. Then my mother died. I went to London, I went to Hong Kong, I went to Australia, and it was in those places, oddly enough, that I began to recall a previous version of myself. I used to live in apartments, and I used to know my neighbors. My apartments were never what you’d call party central, but the doors were open. People stopped by, often invited, often not, and there was a lot of visiting.
For at least two years I wondered what it would be like to meet someone for coffee without calculating how to best shift the get-together to the nearest tavern. For at least two years I wondered what it would be like to sit down to breakfast without the calculator inside of my brain running the numbers to determine the earliest possible time to start that would not constitute too early. For at least two years I wondered what it would be like to just not drink.
After what seemed like an endless onslaught of rain and wind, toward the end of last week the sky cleared and the temperature fell. The horizon, as is often the case around here when January approaches, was enormous, and blue and dry. On Friday I made a batch of black beans and did a bit of housecleaning. On Saturday morning I made a pot of brown rice and heated up the beans, which are always better, in my opinion, a day after the initial cooking. By 11:30 in the morning four of us were sitting around the coffee table in the living room, and for a few hours we talked and laughed with neither an agenda nor a schedule, and it was, from my point of view anyhow, perfect.
