The Long Run

Never make the mistake of thinking that alcoholics are weak, because it took an incredible amount of internal strength and conviction in order for me to keep drinking despite the growing mountain of evidence against it.

If you talk to little kids about drugs, they tell you that drugs make you feel weird and act crazy and hang around with strange people. Getting sober and running long distances has been deeply bizarre, weirder than any drug or combination of drugs I’ve tried. I do things now that my friends find crazier than doing drugs I’ve found on the floor or sleeping in the street.

Acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh pervails completely over the spirit. You don't just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don't care, and you don't care that you don't care.

I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way.

Better my knees end early from overuse than my life end early from underuse.

There is no Google maps app for your life. There is no clearly marked destination — a blue dot — with an illuminated purple line showing you the correct path, where you should go and how you should get there and when you have deviated from it. And that really sucks.

Searching for a better description of this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it’s an antecedent to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.

What’s the secret to my miraculous recovery, you might ask? Well, there is no secret because there has been no miracle. I got better the way everyone gets better: by trial and error and error and error, by fumbling around and making mistakes but not giving up and working incredibly hard at it every day and eventually, through a painful and laborious process of eliminating every wrong turn, finding my way. For me, the hardest part was learning how to care about my life again.

I had battled my way through the mind-bending variety of horrors of the Ninth Circle of Hell to achieve not Heaven or Earth or even Purgatory but just the Eight Circle of Hell. Still, progress is progress.

Our shows were uniformly unmemorable (or at least I don’t remember them) but with nine percent beer and cider at every corner store and codeine for sale over-the-counter, I went for it like we were playing sold-out stadiums.

One hard truth I stumbled upon is this: I drank because I wanted to drink. Every single drink, every single drug I took, I took because I made the decision to get fucked up, and fuck the consequences. I was sad and angry and lonely and a little alcohol made me feel better. It took me a long time to figure out that a lot of alcohol made me feel worse. Whoops.

Never make the mistake of thinking that alcoholics are weak because it took an incredible amount of internal strength and conviction in order for me to keep drinking despite the growing mountain of evidence against it.

Alcohol is a great aggregator: when you are drinking to excess, every problem seems to fall under that umbrella. When you stop drinking, all those little problems scatter, like knocking a container of your sister’s tiny glass beads off the arm of the couch. You can clean up that big clump of them pretty quickly but for the rest of your life, you will be finding them between the seat cushions, under the couch, stuck to your feet, sometimes even carrying them in to bed with you.

acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.

my nihilism was the only thing that had saved me from myself.

The tragedy is not that you’re gonna die this way,” my mother had said to me once, “it’s that you live this way.” I prayed for the earth to open and swallow me whole.

It’s much easier to accede to the grim fact of an early death than it is to deal with the long, fumbling open question of what to do with your life.

There is no Google maps app for your life.

I inspected my own body in the mirror one day. My chest was flat and appeared to actually indent at my sternum. Even sucking in my gut, my stomach bulged, flaring at my sides in generous love handles before it met my hips. I was somehow both fat and skinny. Still,

I lived with one foot in the gutter and the other in the grave, facedown on the bar with both middle fingers in the air.

A bunch of us were worried you were going to kill yourself last year,” she said. “You so were just so nihilistic. The only reason we decided you wouldn’t was that you had said suicide was pointless and stupid.

I could hear him grinning on the phone and that was a small comfort. At least the blow hadn’t knocked any sense into him.

It seemed bleakly ironic to me that someone who craved, deserved and had worked so hard to earn a tragic, early death appeared to be doomed to live forever.