"Hooray!" - Liver

Well this may come as a major surprise to everyone, but guess how much I’ve drank since January 4th? No, not 5 gallons. 375 mL of Jack. That’s it. In fact, 33 f those 3 days I did not touch a drop of alcohol. Hard to believe, I know, but it’s true. I had one relapse in that time and it was just one pint of Jack (You would think that I would spring for a really nice bottle to break my streak, but no, I didn’t. I have no idea why either).

So what have we learned from this period of dryness?

I might, just might, have a bit of an addictive personality
Even though I’ve quit drinking, it’s not like I’ve returned to a normal lifestyle. Nope, I’ve just changed the drug. Instead of drinking half a liter of whiskey a night, I now workout two hours a day. Sometimes more. This past weekend, I ran 10 miles and biked 30, plus did 90 minutes on the elliptical (Yes, I do the elliptical. You can call me gay if you want. But you try running every day with a bad back and the fact that everything from your knees down is equivalent to a 50 year old.) and lifted for two hours.
Remember High School Barney. The one who would go lift on Friday nights and come home from practice and go ref two basketball games? Yeah, he’s back.
Not that this is any better from a strictly psychological point of view (if I don’t work out now, I feel like my day isn’t complete and I can’t fall asleep, and its not like running is more of a social activity than drinking), but I guess it is better from a physical health perspective. In another two to three month, people might not call bullshit when I tell them I once played college basketball (Wait, have I looked in the mirror lately? I don’t think I ever looked like a basketball player. So they’ll still think I’m full of it, but will most likely think I was that guy who really got into intramural games)

I had a hell of a birthday party
In what could best be described as foreshadowing, my Christening was so ridiculous that my godfather got so drunk he was hungover for two days and decided that was the end of the line and stopped drinking after that (we won’t mention how I’ve talked to him exactly once in the past 15 years). So my parties were booze filled from the start. My 26th birthday was no exception. What started off as Maker’s and coke on the LIRR progressed to shots and beers in the East Village, to beer pong in Hoboken and eventually, to me dancing with an extremely fat chick. Before we got to the fat chick though, there was some drama.
The details are sketchy in my mind, but at some point after being a shit talking winner on the beer pong table, J-Man decided that I was a drunkard and started throwing punches at me. Now I don’t object to the drunkard part, but with the sensitive condition of my head, I do object to random punches being thrown at me. Anyway, that got broken up before I concussed myself and J-Man left. 20 minutes later I get a call from my parents saying that J-Man is lost and someone called the house. Eventually, the cops pick him up and I have to convince some officers of the law that a guy with a BAC over 0.25 is responsible enough to take this retard (bonus points for it happening in the shadiest place possible, a public bus yard. If there was any place that was made for a Soprano’s hit, this was it.) J-Man was fine, he just slept it off and I think everything’s cool now.
I’m not saying this was the thing that got me to get my shit together, but it didn’t hurt.

Me fail English? That’s unpossible.
Speaking has never been one of my strong points, probably because I do it so infrequently while sober. However, I have to use verbal communication at work occasionally despite my quest to do everything via e-mail. Being the Drunkard that I am, this presented a problem. Not that the concussions helped anything, but there were definitely times where I was so hungover, complex sentences were not happening. My brain wasn’t working fast enough to get the words out in a pace that wouldn’t put people to sleep. If I knew I had to do something important for work, like give a presentation to 200 people, I would be sober for two or three nights before hand. This got me to a happy medium. Now, I’m at the other extreme in that my brain works too fast for my mouth. It’s already processing the next sentence before I’ve finished the one I’m talking about and sometimes I screw that sentence up. It’s like those workouts where people sprint with a parachute attached to them. Once they take that thing off, they must feel like they’re twice as fast.

If you’re going to Relapse, do it right
Note to self, don’t relapse when you’re exhausted and will just pass out immediately upon getting drunk. You won’t get to enjoy the drunk, but will be stuck with the hangover. The good thing is that I haven’t had a drink since then, so its not like I fell immediately back into my old ways.
I guess it would behoove me to explain the relapse (Another bonus of this is that my vocabulary is increasing exponentially. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word behoove in proper context), but not at this point. Just know that it was work related and I’m hoping to tie this together into a hilarious Barney story if everything works out ok.