Why I Hate Pinot Grigio

daily gratitude list 8.22.22

Brand New: Audio Daily Gratitude List

I’m grateful for a cloudy morning, especially since I have a lot to do this morning. I’m grateful for seeing that what could have been isn’t as important as what could be. I’m grateful for the chance to write this every day. I’m grateful for being able to see how things really were. I’m grateful for being able to see how things really are. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I love dates like today, four twos and an eight, that has to mean something good, right? Speaking of something good, Matt Andersen wrote this the other day:

Your Art Will Go On

This was so authentic and hard-hitting. It made me think about the role of music in my own life and, in particular, in recovery. I grew up in a pretty musical household and a pretty math-oriented household and I do think it’s fascinating the way those things go together. But I’m trying to stay on point today, and the point is that as I read Matt’s piece, I was thinking that music was always a positive force in my life. Music was the big trampoline thing they put on the street when someone was going to jump off a building. Music was my crash landing pad.¹

Meaning, no matter how bad things got, music was always there at the bottom with me. I can remember the song I was listening to when I realized I was an alcoholic way back in 1981. I can remember the music I listened to when I was 60 days sober in 2012 and trying to make it to my 50th birthday without drinking.²I remember what I was listening to when I drove myself to sleep-away rehab in 2016.³ I remember what I listened to when I left the Chili’s, where I drank an hour or two after getting out of rehab.

I went to rehab at a place in Pennsylvania, actually not too far from where my ex-in-laws resided. My girlfriend at the time had insisted that I needed to go and emphasized this point by breaking up with me. So I went and was a model citizen. I read everything and had a lot of amazing insights and made really great contributions to our group discussions. Everyone thought I was doing so well they even let me out a day early.

I got out late Saturday morning and began the drive to the maybe-ex girlfriend’s house. She was pretty impressed by what I’d put together during my stint there and was willing to give things another shot. I was feeling pretty great as I drove off the campus and headed for I-83. I’m pretty familiar with this highway and almost instantly the thought popped into my head: “There’s a Chili’s at one of the exits not too far away. I could drink there and no one would know.” I tried to fight that thought off with my 27 days of rehab learning and my toolkit of recovering alcoholic skills.

Oh, you know I did it

It’s over and I feel fine.⁴

I remember thinking, as I ordered the second glass of Pinot Grigio, how absurd this all was. I literally had just invested a month of my life and a boatload of cash in trying to get sober and it hadn’t gotten me out of Pennsylvania. The most ironic thing, I thought, was how much I hated Pinot Grigio. I had one more and then drove to my ex-girlfriend’s house.

The other thing Matt touched on was the sense of dread and the poisonous self-hatred that accompanies it. Matt wrote about his impending homelessness and the horrible self-reproach: “How could you let yourself get here?” But he kept using. There is nothing harder to explain to civilians than how we keep drinking and using despite having complete clarity about precisely where things are headed. I first tasted that sense of doom in 1981, sitting in a black vinyl booth in an Iowa City dive bar. I knew in that moment, that moment of stark clarity between the second and third Margarita, that I lacked the power to control my drinking, much less the power to ever stop drinking. I remember thinking, “How will this ever end?”

I kept drinking even though I knew exactly where it was taking me. The funny thing is that the drinking made it possible for me to not care about the grim destination, and, of course, to keep drinking. I remember going to an AA meeting and listening to someone say, “I knew that I was going to lose everything and everyone who mattered to me” to the inexorable and inevitable wheel of alcoholism and thinking, “I wonder how that’s going to feel?” It takes hopelessness and an inability to believe in anything to get to the bottom. How did it finally feel? Empty. Completely empty. That moment, I don’t have a song for.

Fortunately, there have been quite a few playlists since then and, if you believe Spotify, this is what I’m listening to the most these days⁵:

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. I’m not sure this is even a thing and I could just be making up stuff here.

2. I didn’t make it that time.

3. Or that time.

4. It is kind of the perfect song for that moment, you have to give me that.

5. I’m telling you, this is going to be so much better if you play the music.