The Sun Burns Cold

Shit, all day at work I was fumbling. I didn’t break anything, but it was like every fucking thing I picked up seemed to want to jump out of my hands. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t drunk. I don’t know what the fuck. It was just one of those days I guess.

It was pretty slow today though, after an initial minor rush of orders. We would have been done super early, but one of the regulars called at around seven and said he was coming in after eight. During the downtime the whole kitchen crew went out for a smoke. I was asking the chef about his oldest son who works here on the weekends. He just graduated police academy and is applying for cop work a couple of towns down. We were talking about the training it takes to work for the feds or the state police, since I knew someone once who went to be a state cop and they told me how fucking hard it was. He was like, yeah, people don’t generally know how hard it is. I told him people don’t generally know how hard it was for me to get trained to be the chief of dishwashing sciences at the restaurant here.

So in four days it will be three months since I consumed acohol. I told myself I was going to stop keeping track, but that’s like telling yourself not to think of a purple banana. The first fucking thing you think of is a purple banana. I wish I could say it’s been such a struggle and were it not for “the grace of God and the program of Alcoholics Anonymous” I’d have a bottle of Jameson attached to my face right now. Wait, I don’t fucking wish that. Anyways, it hasn’t been that hard. Sometimes I feel like I want to have a drink or fifteen, but I just don’t. It’s pretty fucking simple. And then the urge passes and things are swell again. I don’t fuck up my life and my interpersonal relationships by being piss drunk. It’s a win.

Some years back when I was in prison I used to listen to this radio show on a college station out near Pittsburgh. It was a death metal/grind type show, but it had the second best radio show name I ever heard (the first being the Free Things Are Cool show that used to be on the Evergreen state college radio station back out in Oly), it was called The Anti-Struggler Hour. I used to struggle with shit so bad, fucking heroin I struggled with for like eleven years, fucking booze and cocaine I struggled with for years, keeping a goddam job I struggled with…it’s like all this shit I thought I was so powerless over, like I didn’t have a choice it was going to get me if I didn’t get with a “spiritual program” or whatever. I couldn’t see past the struggle, I couldn’t see that no matter if I wanted to get wasted every fucking day for the rest of my life I didn’t have to. They don’t tell you that shit in rehab. They don’t tell you a whole lot of useful shit in rehab, or at least they didn’t used to all the times I went. They just told me I had a disease and I have to go to 12 step meetings for the rest of my life.

But struggling is for strugglers. I don’t struggle with my passing urges to get fucked up. They pass. And the only way that shit is going to get me is if I let it. I don’t struggle with correctly abiding by some program, spiritual or otherwize, and I certainly don’t struggle with my “character defects” or any other of that whackball shit they try to trammel into people in A.A.. I know when I’m being an asshole, and when I don’t my wife is quick enlighten me, and I try to be nicer.

Aw fuck. Look at that it’s four thirty in the morning and I still have to make a dvd for Chef B. before I crash out.  I should finish this out, because really it was coming to a point…but fuckit. Probably three people will read this anyway.

Endnotes:

1) Those Starbucks energy coffee drink things are usually pretty tasty, but tonight I tried the white chocolate flavored one when I went to the mini mart and it tasted like baboon scrotum.

2) I’m still listening to the new Corrosion of Conformity album a lot cause it’s the tits. I just found this tonight though-it’s from their current tour, a performance of the title track from their masterpiece album Animosity. Since I was fouteen or fifteen I’ve wanted this song to be played at my funeral as my casket is getting lowered for the big dirtnap.