730 Days Off the Sauce

Barely

Oswaldo Guayasamín, El Grito no. 3

I.

Late September, 2024. I’m sitting in my living room. It is silent aside from a faint buzzing that is coming from the air conditioner or the refrigerator or my mind. The smell of overripe bananas snakes in from the kitchen. Light makes a half-hearted attempt at coming through the windows; it is muted, gray, impotent, managing only to shine a meager square under the dining table and a lethargic splotch on the rug. The rest of the luminary burden is left to the two lamps bookending the lone chair in the space, which I currently occupy.

Among the objects the lamps expose are monuments to this year’s events: an ACL brace and a pair of crutches; the gold Star of David necklace I gave my ex-girlfriend for her birthday, which she returned after I ended the relationship; my late dog’s woven bucket of toys and bones; a few legal documents from the business bankruptcy case. I haven’t had more than a passing thought about getting rid of any of this stuff. It seems to want to stick around¹, a constant reminder of something I’m not quite sure of.

I walk into the kitchen past the empty dog bowls to grab a sparkling water, though what I really want is an IV drip of Espolòn.

II.

July, 2023. Duke and I return from a jaunt around the neighborhood, having sufficiently marked our territory on any and all forms of vegetation. He hops up on the salt-and-pepper speckled couch that matches his beard, bathing in the euphoric morning light. I settle in at my desk with a cup of coffee and a soft smile and put on a Backseat Lovers album. I figure I’ll do a bit of work on the wallet business, write for a while, then perhaps go run the trails at Pony Pasture. Later, I’ll continue getting the apartment ready for my girlfriend and her dog to move in.

I open my Amazon seller account and furrow my brow. Something's wrong with the numbers. I pause the music, refresh the page, open my inventory dashboard. Every page gives me the same message: I’m out of stock. The coffee grows cold beside me as I open support tickets, emails, tracking numbers. By sunset, I've learned something new: tens of thousands of dollars of inventory can vanish into thin air between a warehouse in Connecticut and a fulfillment center in Kentucky.

III.

December, 2023. I’m wearing a navy and white pinstripe button-down underneath a sort of Aegean blue suit jacket up top. On bottom, I’ve got on a pair of old black athletic shorts with no underwear. The laptop’s camera can’t see under the desk. Plus, putting on pants is now an act of Congress; during a pickup game of basketball the week prior, I went up for a layup and my right knee gave out as I landed. The flavor of the searing pain was familiar—a sensation imprinted during my first ACL tear in October of ’21. A part of me already knows what the results of the MRI will be. I wonder if I still have my old ACL brace.

Through a partially painted-on smile in the waning late afternoon light, I tell the interviewers about all of my impressive sales accomplishments from a past life and explain how twenty months of entrepreneurship will enable me to deliver (shareholder) value for their organization. That I will sell a lot of fucking software, is what I’m saying.

The interview ends with grins and nods and promises of swift follow up. I’m good at this; since graduating college, I’ve gotten job offers from every company with whom I’ve interviewed. I can parse out what people are looking for behind their words. I know what to say, with just the right level of subtlety and flourish, to signal that I’m the best person to deliver on those wishes.

It’s taxing work, though, all these conversational gymnastics. I shut the laptop and slump down into my office chair.

The next day, I get the job offer.

IV.

Mid-June, 2024. My fifth Zoom meeting of the day, during which a customer says “Just counting down the days until Friday!” and everyone contorts their jaws into something resembling a smile and says “Ha ha ha!”, wraps up. I shut my laptop and leave the office, commuting through the hallway to the living room chair. Duke follows me out of the office and arthritically lays down on the rug.

The house is quiet in the evenings now that it counts one less human and one less canine among its residents. When I took the job, I told myself I wouldn’t let the stuff I cared about—writing, relationships, my nascent lacrosse company, laughing—fall by the wayside. But increasingly I find myself sitting in the living room after work, immobilized by something viscous and heavy that the word exhaustion doesn’t quite capture.

There’s also something I haven’t felt in eighteen months: a squirmy, frenetic feeling that finds my moment-to-moment reality intolerable, that wants to wriggle out of it by any means necessary, to escape or numb against it. For the first time in a year and a half, I want a drink.

I settle for mindlessly scrolling on my phone.

V.

Late October, 2024. The sun is setting earlier and earlier, and the day feels over before it begins. The amount of caffeine required to reach activation energy has soared to the point that I am single-handedly propping up the profitability of Califia Farms Cold Brew. Up until the apex of the caffeination curve, which occurs around noon, I have enough synthetic fuel to force the minimum viable self-suppression necessary to be a Productive Employee. After that, all bets are off.

It’s evening. Pitch dark outside, blinds closed. I am the only living being in the house, unless you count the living room chair I’ve melted into. The quiet has become a synesthetic entity all its own. I can hear everything, everywhere: planes flying over Canada, foghorns in the Atlantic, a luau in Maui. I can smell the mezcal in Mexico. The living room is a liminal space.

By this point the numbing has become ritualistic. I’ve found a few decent strategies: scrolling on Twitter, watching sports games I don’t care about, buying a scoop of birthday cake ice cream in a waffle cone from Blue Cow. But it’s a band-aid/stab wound situation. Ice cream is pretty feeble in the face of existential dread.

The desire to drink is now acute, the pull toward escapism urgent. My body will not settle into itself. Feeling unbearably cold, I draw a hot bath. I get in; within minutes, I am sweating. The rebellion against reality is cellular. Enveloping.

I’m not quite sure what stops me from driving to the ABC store and buying a bottle of bourbon. Perhaps there’s a part of me that knows that this dread must be savored—that the moment I drink is the moment I throw in the towel and resign myself to a life that isn’t mine, the way I did for all of my twenties. That the dread is a fuel source I must preserve until it’s time to use it.

Hours pass. My bedside clock says it’s 3am. I’m staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet, wondering when it will be time to use it.

VI.

December 2, 2024. The early morning light coming through the east window of my office casts an angelic glow onto the desk. I’m energetic despite having gotten home late from an event last night. It’s my last week at the job. A month ago, I met with the CEO and told him I just didn’t have any more in me.

I put on long johns under my sweatpants and a jacket over my sweatshirt and go for a walk. Despite it being near-freezing, the sun is radiant, and there isn’t a cloud to be found among the ocean of sky. It smells crisp. The sound of creatures persisting in the face of the cold fills the air: humans making piles of leaves, squirrels scampering up and down the bare trees, birds welcoming the morning without judgment.

Winter always feels pregnant with meaning and significance. The sharp edges of the cold, the totality of the darkness that swallows the day, the naked trees standing defiantly. There’s a certain weight to it.

Two years ago, I would have been nursing a hangover instead of noticing any of this.

I walk through the front door and survey the living room. The year’s artifacts have begun to disappear. The ACL brace and crutches have moved to Goodwill. Bankruptcy documents have been shredded. The necklace is packed away into a drawer. Only Duke’s possessions remain untouched: his bed still sits in the corner of my office, his woven basket of toys in the living room next to an entryway table that will soon be sold. For the first time in months, I sit in my chair, comfortably.

1. A nod to the Peach Pit song “Shampoo Bottles”