A decade without alcohol

January 4, 2010 is the day I mark has having had my last drink of alcohol. It might have been a day or two earlier than but four is a lucky number for me and I decided to set that as the date. This past Jan. 4 marks a decade since I’ve had a drink.

The time went by quickly. Since 2010 a lot has happened. I got married and had children. I left journalism and “went over to the dark side” of public relations. Could I have done those things if I had still been drinking? I don’t know.

I am confident that stopping drinking was the right thing for me, but quitting drinking was not some massive and sudden wonderful change. There’s no magic transformation that turns someone instantaneously from a pathetic drunk to a charming success. All of life’s frustrations are still there, and the warm confidence that comes with drinking is now gone.

And while it’s worked for me, the non-drinking life is not for everyone. I think even people who have problems with drugs or alcohol don’t necessarily have to quit completely. There’s a middle ground that most of the world can navigate. One of the signs that I needed to stop drinking was when I was bowled over at my ability to have only one single beer at a punk rock show I went to. I caught myself as I was glowing in a self-congratulatory mood on the walk to the subway from Trash Bar—uh, actually, this is what most of the world is able to pull off every day!

Quitting drinking wasn’t something I did on a whim or at the spur of the moment. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I had taken long breaks from drinking, sometimes as long as three months at a time, to show myself that I could do it. When I first quit, I only gave myself the goal of stopping drinking for one year. Only after one year without alcohol did I decide to officiallybid goodbye to the drinking life.

The drinking life had been a fun one. I’d be the worst kind of hypocrite to rage against drinking since I was an absolute maniac with booze for the better part of two decades. I have good memories from those times and made many great friends over rounds of drinks, I can’t just throw all of that away. I can still be around people who drink; I just don’t. I won’t create a new identity or try to reconfigure my entire life because I don’t drink any more – that would truly be giving alcohol power that it doesn’t deserve.

But it got to the point of not being fun anymore. I would ponder and plan out how I was going to approach a night of drinking and then all my well-intentioned plans of moderation would go right out the window. I was tired of waking up with long gaps in my memory, incredibly hung over, and realizing I had spent twice the amount of money I wanted to. I had no one to be angry at but myself, and my weekend mornings regularly began with waking up to this miserable, impotent rage. 

There were some moments that stand out in my decision but thankfully no major disasters. I miraculously never got arrested for drunk driving while in college, no major bar fights or major accidents litter my beer-fueled past. But slowly the magic of the alcohol began to wear thin and not work as well anymore. And all the things I felt I need to drink to enjoy—dating women, going to concerts, playing music, reveling in the creative act that drives us to joyful madness—these were all things I was supposed to be enjoying anyway, and if I needed to be drunk to enjoy them, maybe I was on the wrong path.

So I went ahead and quit drinking on my own, though I did read a book that was helpful in my first year of not drinking. Drinking,A Love Story by CarolineKnapp is an impressive memoir and I highly recommend it if you are questioning your drinking. A lot of what she described as signs of having real drinking problems was very recognizable, and it provided the well-researched bulwark that helped me decide that I was on the right path in putting booze aside.

In her book, Knapp quits drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and the Alcoholics Anonymous route is one I decided to avoid at all costs. Alcoholics Anonymous wallows in pathetic victimology and peddles its soft-core religion incessantly. Furthermore, many people I know who joined AA have come back to drinking. If AA is the only alternative to drinking yourself to death, have at it, but the success rate is low and its philosophy teaches weakness.

The past 10 years have been filled with a lot of ups and downs, and I’m glad that I experienced them without the hazy filter of alcohol, which for me had become a sad crutch. If the magic dies, don’t be afraid to move on. If I can do it, so can you. 

College Point discovery: The Poppenhusen Institute

It was a Saturday and we were looking for something family friendly to do with the kids.

For a long time, I studiously avoided anything deemed “family friendly” as it was either specifically for children like ‘Sesame Street’ or something that was toned down and devoid of any of the reality-driven spice of life. But my time as a parent has changed my view and definition.

For us, “family friendly” doesn’t mean for something sanitized or dumbed-down, it means we want to be able to find a place to change a diaper. We are not afraid of adult content corrupting our children except in extreme examples; we’re afraid of adult content boring the crap out of our children.

Case in point: we looked up local events on our local Macaroni Kid and found an Oktoberfest nearby. You wouldn’t normally think that an Oktoberfest celebration would be a place to take children, that it would be nothing but loud, beer-soaked hipsters being dramatically unaware. And maybe in Brooklyn that would be the case, but the PoppenhusenInstitute of College Point, Queens proved that wrong. We live not too far from this institution, which is 150 years old now. A center for German culture, it’s evolved to become a lot more without losing sight of its original cultural mission.

College Point is somewhat of an out-of-the-way place by New York City standards. There’s almost a small community village feeling to it as its small businesses have thrived. Driving down 14^th Street, where the Institute is, the businesses of College Point Avenue recede and the street is a bit narrower and more residential, until you get closer to the water, where more industrial businesses are. The PoppenhusenInstitute is bordered by businesses but in an area which is still largely residential. It’s got a fenced-in property (another bonus for bringing small children) and is a magnificent building that dates to 1868.

Being the day of the fall equinox, the weather was perfect for the outdoor event, which was held in the shaded back yard of the Institute. Decorated with blue and white balloons, we paid $18 admission and that included a lot of free entertainment and an area of games for kids. There was free face painting for children and prizes as well.

On site was an award-winning artist, Brian Lipperd, painting portraits. He produced a great portrait of your youngest daughter and touched it up when she smeared it. This artist formerly worked as a portrait artist in Florence, Italy and has had other prestigious residences around the world and will be teaching art classes at the Poppenhusen Institute. You think they have awesome portrait artists at Chuck E Cheese? Think again.

The Institute was once a village community center for College Point, it even served as a local sheriff’s station and still has two small jail cells that housed town drunks or other minor miscreants. It was the site of the first free public kindergarten in the United States. It has a magnificent performance space as well as an exhibit of early Native American life of the area.

The food was affordable and we bought hot dogs for the kids and my wife and I enjoyed some bratwurst, as it was an Oktoberfest and that felt like the right thing to do. There was traditional German music and men in lederhosen and women in traditional German dresses performed dances. My wife came in second place in a beer stein holding contest, winning a nice beer stein filled with beer.

The Poppenhusen Institute holds painting classes for children and has numerous performances and things worth doing. It is well worth the trip to College Point to visit this cultural treasure.

Goodbye Alumni Club

The secret to a good bar has nothing to do with what beers are on tap or what its décor looks like. The only valid measure of a bar is its character, it supersedes all other measures. I’ve been in bars that reeked of piss and fruit flies that were a thousand times better than the cleanest, sleekest pre-fabricated gastropub.

Dive bars are often the best bars to visit. One of the finest pubs in the recent history of New York was the Village Idiot, which closed its doors in 2004 and had the most eclectic crowd ever. My first visit there a 6-foot-plus transvestite played pool with some tipsy yuppies while construction workers drank at the bar. Mars Bar had bathrooms that were even filthier than CBGB’s bathrooms, which were legendary for their filth. But it didn’t matter. Mars Bar and Village Idiot brought some of the most interesting varieties of people to drink together.

Of course there’s a certain hip cache to the dive bar now, but you can tell which bars are faking it and which bars aren’t. I like to think I’ve visited enough bars to be able to tell the difference without too much effort, but I’ve been out of the drinking game for more than five years now and my visits to bars are few and far between.

And New York City has lost some of its best dive bars. There are a few though that are keeping things alive. NancyWhiskey, Rudy’s and The Patriot are all the real thing: good dive bars with real character.

But great New York bars are not restricted to the five boroughs, and one of the finest bars ever recently hosted its last hurrah.

The Alumni Club just outside the city limits in New Hyde Park, New York is a place I discovered through my wife, who was a long-time regular and used to tend bar there. It sat among a row of storefronts and its location was generally unremarkable. You needed a car to get there though theoretically you could take a Nassau County bus.

The Alumni Club was a bar that was both eclectic in its clientele and without pretension. While it had its population of longtime regulars, no strangers were ever made to feel unwelcome. I don’t even drink and I was welcome there. I would even bring in large beverages from the 7-Eleven across the street and no one would mind. I’d always ask the bartender if he or she wanted anything. I’m convinced the bar lost no money on my account; my wife could drink enough for both of us.

There was almost always some offering of free food and the owner or bartender encouraged visitors to eat. Once I went there to catch the end of the Georgia Bulldogs game and found they were in the midst of a “casino night” themed evening. The bar had some system worked out where they weren’t technically gambling there but I wasn’t sure how it worked and I figured the less I knew the better.

But the best part about the Alumni Club was the character and good atmosphere. It was not in a trendy part of the city and had nothing to prove. People who went there were working people who wanted to drink, not people who wanted to be seen drinking.

Needless to say a bar of this caliber of excellence tends to have many loyal patrons and when the bar announced it was going to be shutting its doors, employees and patrons alike began planning the farewell party.

The last Saturday this May was the Alumni Club’s big blowout party that included a lot of food and copious amounts of alcohol. T-shirts made for the event read, “We drank it dry.” Patrons lived up to the boast: when bartenders showed up for work the next day they found that the place had run out of beer.

This week Alumni Club will close its doors for good. Guests and employees will remember their alma mater with pride. 

All Hail Dashing Warriors

This past Saturday I participated in a Warrior Dash, a competitive obstacle course race held in various places throughout the country. ‘Raced’ or ‘Competed’ wouldn’t be the right word, since I had little chance of winning and couldn’t care less what my time was.

The steep uphill climb had lots of warriors but very little dashing. Much of the little level ground was taken up by either obstacles or large muddy puddles where the water went up to one’s waist. Obstacles included scaling walls, crawling under barbed wire and jumping over fire. Most of us just trudged along in the mud, trying not to fall down. I fell down more times than I can count. But, I made it over, under and across every single obstacle, which was my goal.

There are a number of these events of varying difficulty that are gaining in popularity. The Warrior Dash is perhaps the easiest of them all, designed more for people who would rather drink beer in the sun than prepare for any warfare. They encourage people to run the course in costumes and give out soft imitation Viking helmets to all participants. A man dressed as Richard Simmons won for best costume; I didn’t see who won for best beard as I was too busy trying in vain to wash mud from my clothing in the Warrior Wash sprinkler-like shower.

The Tough Mudder is increasingly popular, it has teams of competitors run a longer race and compete in more difficult obstacles and physical challenges. Toughest of them all may be the Spartan Race.

I believe the reason these events are becoming more popular is that people are thirsting for adventure and challenge, and because we want desperately to prove to ourselves that we're not one of the neutered marshmallows we see all around us.

Many of us spend our days behind a desk or counter, hoping to get just a little taste of the life of a warrior, conscious of the fact that the life of a real warrior means sleeping in a ditch and praying you don’t get killed.

We’ll take our little taste of the warrior’s life, though I suspect that some of us are doing this because we want to toughen up for potentially tough and violent days ahead. That people are paying for the privilege of being put to the test is a sign of hope that some of us are trying to claw our way out of the hole we've found ourselves in as a people.

One of the signs posted along the Warrior Dash course was: ‘To Make Up For The Other 364 Days.’ See you there next year. 

(Photo taken without permission from Tru Stories from the 222nd Floor)

Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend

I told people I was taking a year off from drinking. That year is now over but I’m not going back.

Quitting drinking was something in the back of my mind for a long time. I even took extended breaks from drinking for months at a time here and there, though sometimes book-ending these periods with serious benders. I pulled off these periods of not drinking just fine. It was the drinking life that gave me trouble.

I found a book I had read about when it was published called "Drinking, A Love Story," by Caroline Knapp. It’s a very good book despite some of its mushy emotional female content. Knapp points out that if you are someone who thinks and worries about drinking a lot, that’s a sure-fire sign that you should quit. That idea really stuck with me, because so many times I found myself doing my own form of alcohol calculus (if I have only four beers and then maybe have a soda so I’m not too drunk; if I start with a mixed drink and then switch to beer I’ll be OK) that continually left me short-changed. In Knapp’s book she recommends Pete Hamill’s "A Drinking Life," which is a brilliant memoir about growing up in New York. Drinking features prominently in Hamill’s book, but it’s a great New York memoir first, and not really a book about drinking at all. He does detail his decision to quit drinking, though, and mentions that he saw himself as acting out his life instead of living it.

Knapp’s and Hamill’s books were filled with a lot of things I recognized and encouraged me to give up the ghost on the drinking life.

I’d like to say that there was a big clarifying event that forced my hand and made me swear off booze, but the truth is I got tired of it. I got tired of waking up with a big headache, a lot less money and the painful fear that I had done or said something stupid enough to lose friends in the process. I got tired of waking up angry over the crappy state I was in and having no one to be angry at but myself. There were plenty of times when I drank a lot and didn’t overdo it and had a great time and patted myself on the back for that, but those times were being outnumbered by the times when I set out to pace myself and ended up in the zone where you’re on a great drunken roll and you just have to have that next sweet drink, and eventually you’re too drunk and you hate yourself for it.

I would be the worst kind of hypocrite to denounce drinking altogether. I dedicated too many hours to the fine art of consuming alcohol to stab that old friend in the back like that. There have been too many good times spent with the stuff, too many good memories forged with beer and whiskey to look upon them as anything but old friends. But sometimes friends outlive their usefulness.

Drinking is only as good as the help it gives you to do the other things you want to do, to have the real adventures and the real good times. It’s not the drinking that really makes for the good time; it’s the courage to meet women, the fun of joking and speaking very frankly with your friends, to blast through the social awkwardness that might cripple us. If drinking is still a help and a healthy supplement to life itself, then great. But for me it turned from a stepping stone to a stumbling block. I spent too much time worrying about drinking to make it fun anymore.

I have generally kept quiet about quitting drinking, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. Being defined by your drinking is a dead end, but so is being defined by your not drinking. It’s true I don’t go to bars much anymore on my own, but I won’t refuse to go to if I’m invited to hang out with friends there. I understand that my friends aren’t trying to force me to drink, they simply want to hang out and bars are the usual way to do that. It would be the most arrogant, self-centered crap to ask all of my friends to rearrange their lives on my account.

One thing I will absolutely not do is join Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program. I know many good people who are involved with these groups and joining them is certainly preferable to drinking yourself to death, but the 12-step program is back-door religion. It tells its followers that they are powerless and can find salvation only in the inane catch phrases and prayers of its program. By some measures it is a cult. Your own free will is your highest power; anyone who tells you otherwise is only feeding you another form of poison.

So far I’ve made out fine without any prayers, group hugs or other nonsense. For me, quitting drinking was pretty easy. Instead of drinking something with alcohol in it I drink something without alcohol in it. I always was a big soda drinker, and I’ve resigned myself to enjoying that vice if nothing else. I’m the only person I know who sneaks non-alcoholic beverages into concerts.

I could tell you that drinking soda is just as much fun as drinking beer or bourbon, and that if you quit drinking you’ll be high on life, but that would be bullshit. But a lot of people have the attitude that I once had that life would be impossible without drinking, and that’s bullshit too.