gemini://beyondneolithic.life/posts/alcoholism_is_hard

For those of you who have never experienced it, you probably don't know that being an alcoholic is extremely hard work. It's more difficult than any job I've ever had, and probably more difficult than any job you've had either, to be quite honest. It requires intense long-term planning; rigorous schedules; quick thinking and cleverness; excellent judgment; deception and subterfuge; an incredible amount of will power; total fearlessness in the face of danger; a willingness to sacrifice anything to accomplish your goal; almost all of your time; and a whole lot of your money, sometimes all of it, depending on income. I'm not talking about the hard work of getting sober — I'm talking about the hard work of _staying drunk_, and especially staying drunk while trying to pretend you aren't. To be full-time alcoholic who's currently drinking is to have a set of skills that rival the most accomplished of spies.

You have to know when every liquor store in a ten-mile radius opens and closes. You have to schedule precisely when you must start and stop so you're not too drunk to do the things that you actually need to do to survive like work, or at least pretend to work. Once that becomes impossible to sustain, you have to know exactly how many days you can feign sickness before it will cause a problem. You have to be able to judge what things you can simply put off and for how long before you risk being discovered or loosing your job, and which things you absolutely must take care of regardless of your mental state. You have to be able to lie to anyone you've ever told you'd never drink again, right to their face, if they become suspicious. You need to be able to feign sobriety at any time without warning, even if you're 20 drinks in. You have to be willing to accept that after a couple days, your body and brain will be so broken that you will be forced to sacrifice leaving the bed to do anything other than eat, piss, and get more booze.

But no matter how good you are at drinking, the truth is you will always eventually fail at it. There are only a few possible outcomes in the final analysis: Either you die; you get caught and your friends and family lovingly force you to quit the only activity you really care about in that moment; or you finally burn yourself out and give up, which means desperately seeking out help from loved ones — or really anyone you think will be willing to help, because you might not have many loved ones left. Those are the three options. That's it.

Why am I saying all this? By way of explaining why I haven't posted anything to this capsule in more than a week: Because I relapsed for a bit. I don't actually know how many people see any of the things I post here or how interesting they find it. It is a super new capsule and relatively niche. I see my own server logs, but it's tough to who are the indexers, who are the aggregators, who are the researchers, and who's just a reader, and I haven't made any effort to find out — that feels like a violation of the Gemini ethos that is still forming in the community and that I'm still learning about. But for whatever reason, Gemini has become somewhat important to me.

I'm not a developer or a tech wizard. I'm just a tinkerer who happens to work in the tech world in a non-technical capacity, and thought it would be fun to learn more about computers and command lines and servers, and I thought Gemini comported with my own thoughts of why the internet sucks, and how it could be better. I had a ton of fun learning about Gemini and a bunch of other things out there. It's made me fall in love with small computing in general, by which I mean anything that's just focused on doing a few things really well. It's made me realize how distracting and ultimately limiting big giant programs with thousands of "features" can be, and how "UI/UX" is so often just a euphemism for controlling your attention against your will. And plus, I also found a place to write a few thoughts here and there and post a few much more interesting thoughts from some other folks. And a place where I can read all kinds of interesting things from all kinds of interesting people who know so much and work so hard and build so much cool stuff.

So I'm super bummed that I ignored this smol place that I have grown fascinated by because I decided to spend a week working really hard to drink as much as I could, even thought I had six months of sobriety under my belt. I guess my point is that there are a lot of really, really good things out there that are much more worth my time than drinking, and Gemini has turned out to be one of them which I never would have guessed, even if I'm a more or less passive participant who just rambles on about capitalism and likes to post about physics and anthropology and communism. So thanks to everyone who makes it possible. Don't get me wrong: I am not claiming Gemini saved my life or something. Not at all. I just was surprised at how much I turned out to have missed such a simple little thing while I was off destroying myself.

I'm sober again — or actually, still detoxing, which means days of incredibly painful withdrawals and equally painful mea culpas to a number of people. And planning again for how to stay sober. _And_ dealing with an incredibly useless American health care system that is designed never to care for your health if it can be avoided.

In the midst of a week-long, 30-drink-a-day bender which I was desperately trying to end — and which I knew would require medical intervention since this is not my first rodeo — my doctor scheduled an appointment for a _month in the future_. Best she could do, apparently. My therapist (whom I am actually very lucky to have and afford in the first place, and who is supposedly focused on treating substance abuse) did not even offer to see me when I reached out to him, and the doctors on his team who may have been able to help are "out of network," which means they could not see me either, and even if they could, they said they would refuse because of the "upcoming holiday." I was told to go to an emergency room that would cost thousands of dollars I don't have. Eventually, I simply called my doctor's office back, drunkenly demanded to see anyone at the practice who was available (while simultaneously vomiting into a trash can), and that seemed to be enough to get me an appointment for eight hours later at 9pm. In less than 15 minutes, I had been prescribed a few life-saving simple pills that would prevent me from dying of delerium tremens while I detox at home with my partner (there are no hospital beds available to detox under medical supervision, and even if there were, it would cost $40,000 or so).

I'm an alcoholic, it's hard, and for some reason this capsule is the only place I've ever wanted to write about it