September

I’m grateful for the way the colors change in the sunrise this time of year. I’m grateful for Fall. I’m grateful for walking home from the office. I’m grateful for confidence and ease. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Song of the Week:

I realize I’m a touch late, calendar-wise, on this selection for song of the week. I have loved this song since it was released way back in 1978. I remember hearing it on the radio while cruising the streets of Iowa City in my friend Mark’s green Ford Pinto.¹ I didn’t have a girlfriend, so it seemed kind of romantically aspirational.

First things first: Have you listened to the podcast?

Breakfast with An Alcoholic: Season 3 Premiere

Over the years, when I would hear “September,” I could find myself wishing for someone that I met on the 21st night of September, and then it would be December and the love that we had found in September would have bells ringing and souls singing. I would imagine how this would be our song and we’d share it and the heady memories of those early, falling in love days, whenever we’d hear it. Which would be good, because it is played everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.² There would never be a cloudy day.

The problem is that I have really struggled wanting to listen to this song for a long time. See, I met someone a long time ago, 2013, I think, and our first date was at a really cute Thai restaurant on 14th Street in DC. If I recall correctly, it was the 21st night of September. She was quiet and funny, she had a very shy smile that had a way of slowly lighting up her face. She liked to laugh and she had a way of surprising me with ways of looking at things that I’d never considered. She had a really cute way of looking at me over the tops of her glasses.

We laughed through dinner, and I walked her home afterwards. It was a clear, crisp night and you could see the stars. We both lived in the same neighborhood and the restaurant was also in the neighborhood, yet, I managed to get horribly lost on the way to her house—which was only a 5-minute walk away. 15 or 20 minutes later, we reached her house and she didn’t seem to mind the circuitous route.³ She asked me in, and I was then ambushed by four of her kids, who were given the opportunity to give me the once-over.

I walked home smiling, it had occurred to me at some point in the evening that it was the 21st night of September, so I thought that was a very good thing. There was one slight problem: I had told her I was an alcoholic and didn’t drink, she had a good friend in the Program, so she knew quite a bit and she was okay with it. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I was still drinking.

In fact, prior to dinner with her at the cute Thai restaurant, I spent a bit of time at the Thai restaurant across the street guzzling back a glass of wine.⁴ Was I technically drunk when I told her I didn’t drink? Maybe.

Nevertheless, things with K. proceeded and we were pretty much living together a few months later. My dog Kayla was still with me and gamely shuttled back and forth with me. She loved all of the attention and she was drawing close to the end of her time, I think she was 14 at the time.

My very elegant Kayla

K. really loved me. We did lots of great things and she so wanted a future with me. I was drinking every day. Not just some days, or most days, every single day. I’d go to the office and drink at lunch. I’d stop at the Logan Tavern on “my way home,” in the afternoons. I’d leave the office around 4 and head to the bar. Around 6, I’d text that I was wrapping up. I’d have another glass or two and then head home for dinner.

Of course, I talked about the meetings I went to, all of the great sober thoughts I was thinking. I wondered how she didn’t know how much I was drinking. I wondered why I was lying to her every single day. I wondered why I couldn’t even contemplate not drinking. The problem was that I kept trying to find the answers in the bottom of wineglasses. Trust me, I was a very diligent hunter. I turned over a lot of glasses of wine looking for the truth.

Kayla the dog got cancer. Her long-time companion, Buddy, had died of the same kind of cancer a few years before, so I knew the deal. There wasn’t a cure and the best we could do was make Kayla as comfortable as we could for as long as we could. She was 15 by this time, and I was secretly hoping to be able to coax her to 16.

I began roasting a chicken every Sunday—it was mostly for Kayla. I had decided that it was no more dog food for her—she ate roasted chicken and green beans most of the time. The treatment I was giving Kayla actually started to incense K.—I think she felt under-appreciated, and at one point asked why I never roasted a chicken for her. My drinking was definitely escalating and I think she knew something was wrong. There was a lot of tension in the air, lots of minor arguments.

Kayla was coming to the end of her time and I was pretty drunk for most of mine. Finally, one night in early March, a silly fight boiled over on the street outside of K’s house and somehow, I don’t actually remember the details or the conversation, we broke up. I don’t remember anything else about that night, but I do know that the next day I felt pretty free to drink. And drink I did.

I’d been to the doggie-oncologist earlier that week and she had told me it was time to start thinking about the end. Kayla wasn’t in any pain, but that wasn’t going to be the case for much longer. I had let things with Buddy go a little too long, and he was in real distress at the end, and I didn’t want to see that again. I made an appointment at the vet.

I drank most of that week. In the evenings, Kayla and I would walk to one of the neighborhood joints and we’d sit outside, even thought it was still a little nippy, and I would order two cheeseburgers. I’d walk Kayla home, get her set up in bed and then I would head back out to one of my spots and drink and drink and drink. I would look at my phone and scroll through K’s Instagram, trying to figure out if she was already seeing someone.⁵ I watched stupid videos like this as I wallowed in self-pity; losing my dog and my girlfriend in the same month sounded like a country song and a good reason for a few more glasses of wine:

Kayla’s vet appointment was on a Tuesday afternoon. I left the office and drank for a while to steady my nerves for what was coming. I went home and even though Kayla was pretty slow and pretty drugged up, she was still excited when I pulled the leash off the hook by the door. We walked to the vet’s office, also on 14th Street, a few blocks above the cute little Thai restaurant.

Kayla was very calm, she got a healthy dose of something else to make her even more relaxed. I got down on the floor with her, she put her paw on my shoulder. I stroked her soft, soft fur and thanked her for being such a good dog, for being such a good friend, for staying with me for so long. I heard that soft, soft snore, the one that had kept me company at night for a long time, and then she was gone.

I really didn’t want to cry in front of anyone, so I rushed out of the vet and headed home as fast as I could go. I made it home and the tears didn’t really start until I took the empty leash out of my pocket and hung it up on the hook next to the door. The next few weeks were a pretty desolate time. I was truly alone—not even a dog—and I drank. A lot.

I spent a lot of time fixated on my own pity, that does help create the right ambience for a night or week of drinking. I made a few efforts to get K. back—laughable, horrible emails that I’m sure I was drunk when I wrote. I really wasn’t able to even consider what I had put her through, what I was putting her through. Like every still-drinking alcoholic, I couldn’t understand why my promise to “do better in the future,” wasn’t enough. The reason it wasn’t enough is that she had figured out that I had lied to her pretty much every single day. Every time we talked about the future had been a lie; Every time I had told her what she meant to me was a lie. Everything was a lie.

At one point, she gamely suggested that if I “went somewhere,” and got like six-months, maybe we could talk. I was incensed! All that rehab and AA stuff is nonsense—I can do a better job myself. There’s another lie. Finally, on September 21st of 2015, I sent a drunken email, full of remorse and regret and it was the anniversary of our first date and shouldn’t that mean something? It did. It meant I got an email from her daughter asking me not to write her mom any more emails.

We alcoholics have a hard time accepting what we did. I’m not advocating for more feelings of guilt and shame, I’m advocating for more feelings of empathy, for the people who loved us and tried to stick with us and did the best they could until the tide of alcoholic chaos inevitably swamped the boat. It always, always sinks the boat.

We get a few weeks of sobriety, maybe just a few days, and we are full of wisdom and self-awareness. Now I see what was going on—I’ll just make a few minor adjustments and we should be good. That’s why the wheels have to come off for so many of us. It takes real catastrophe to shake us out of our alcoholic torpor; It takes the extreme winnowing of options to persuade to choose the course that was always there in front of us.

Yesterday was a beautiful Fall day and the evening was really lovely, too. I was walking home, tired from another long, but satisfying day at the office. I was looking forward to leftover Thai food, and doing my usual fast-walking, tourist and slow-moving pedestrian dodging, and Spotify decided to throw “September” at me as a recommendation.⁶ I listened to it for the first time in a long time.

Golden dreams were shiny days,
 and, do you remember? 
There never was a cloudy day. 

I think that’s true. Happy Friday.

1. Yes, it turns out his was the potentially exploding kind. It didn’t explode, but did get recalled.

2. Even a TikTok trend.

3. If you know me, you know that getting lost is part of the deal.

4. By this, I mean roughly 3 glasses of wine. I had my own system of measurement for alcohol and also for honesty.

5. It had been about ten days…

6. I have like nine other Earth, Wind & Fire songs on the playlist, so this is not so surprising.