Sayonara to My Best Friend and Mortal Enemy

It's time for me to "do what the sober people do" as warrior-poet Steve-O of "Jackass" once said.

I’ve never met the Tito of the “Handmade Vodka” fame. If I met him, I would shake his hand and congratulate him on such a fine product. Then I would sucker punch him. The bastard could’ve at least sent me a Christmas card in front of the tree with his beautiful family inside the warm, 20,000-square foot that I bought him.

I can’t pinpoint the exact dates I shifted from “heavy drinker” to “definitely has a drinking problem.” But I know where the “full-blown alcoholic” days began. Early February 2020.

You can probably guess what has happened since then to only compound the desire to forget about the rest of the world if only for a couple of hours.

It was around the time that I realized Tito’s had fewer calories than beer. It had fewer sugars than seltzers. It caused fewer hangovers than brown liquor. Why would I ever drink anything else?

Since making double Tito’s with a splash of Sprite “my drink” — I’ve almost died of dehydration in a Costa Rican jungle. I’ve awoken in the Grant Hospital Trauma Bay with a ventilator shoved down my throat. I lost three teeth and shattered my jaw that was inevitably wired shut for a month… on top of nine broken ribs and an ankle.

Recently, on my bike, I’ve awoken with a fractured elbow and lacerated big toe in separate incidents. Out all that, I only remember the jungle floor.

The average person would probably be like, “Man, just lay off the sauce! Order a beer or something. There is no reason to drink a pint and a half of Tito’s a day over the course of several days.”

The problem is moderation has never been in my repertoire. I’ve tried every rule you possibly could. Just drink beer. Only go to bars on the weekends. No drinking more than one day in a row except on vacation. No having Tito inside the house.

Any half measure leads back to the same place.

The last and only time I’ve ever tried to get sober was the Summer of 2019 after I self-sabotaged my way out of a long-term relationship and moved back to Columbus from Piqua.

I went 90 days sober. Lost weight. Saved money. Didn’t feel like shit every day until noon. It was amazing.

Then I went to Mexico City, met a Colombian woman, and thought, “Hey, I’m in Mexico. What is one margarita going to hurt?” Well, almost three years to the day, I can attest to how much exactly one margarita can hurt.

Not that alcohol has been all bad for me. Some of my greatest memories happened when my friends and I weren’t legally allowed to operate heavy machinery. But I have had about every positive experience you can while drinking alcohol. And somewhere in the last three years, the scale has tilted the other way to the point this is getting pathetic.

I’ve come to realize that Tito—and all alcohol, really—is an extremist, and the only way to rationalize with an extremist is to put a bullet through their skull (don’t quote me on that last part, state and local political hobgoblins).

My drinking puts me on the train tracks to calamity, and the only option is to stop shoveling coal into the train to fuel it. The difference between this time and the last time I tried to get sober is that I am not returning from the hinterlands of Western Ohio this time. I have an established support network that will help me the first time I’m feeling sorry for myself and realize nobody but me will know if I walk across the street to Kroger for a pint of Tito and get drunk by myself in my living room.

I don’t need any well wishes or ‘attaboys, either. Not that they aren’t appreciated. They are, but as of this writing, I’ve only been sober for:

It’s crazy what you can accomplish in a weekend if you abstain from alcohol. I spent about 20% of my alcohol-related expenditures. I lost five pounds. I got the best night of sleep that I’ve had in months.

I know I can do at least 90 days because I’ve done it before. That would put me smack-dab into the thicket of football season, but by then I’ll have already proven to myself that I can watch football games without cloaking my myriad of substance abuse issues in my sports fandom. And if I can get through football season without drinking, look out, because the rest of the year is a cakewalk when I put my mind to it.

As sad as it is, it took me 19 years of drinking—I am 35—to realize that I will never be a person who can gets drunk five nights a year. There are no rules or stipulations I can place on alcohol that won’t eventually lead to me strapped back to the Tito Train.

There is no other destiny other than eradication; it’s just a matter if it’s going to be Tito or myself.

If nothing else, I refuse to give the haters and the losers the pleasure of seeing me drink myself to death. They were always right to call me a drunk, but I always warned them they better pray I never decide to put that bottle down.

For you, loyal subscriber to President Xi Jinping’s Patriots Caucus, the good news it that I’ve never deluded myself into thinking I needed enough Tito to incapacitate a rhinoceros to produce art that interests people.

I’ve known, deep down, for a long time that I was making art in spite of my alcoholism, not because of it. This can only lead to a more robust product, which of course is bad news for the cabal of scumbags that run this city and state.

Much like the People’s Republic of China, the best days are ahead for The Rooster.

THOSE WMDs. The controversial plan to release the Mississippi… California’s forever fire… We’re going to see abortion fugitives; here’s how to protect them… The “free” checking myth costs consumers billions every year… The case for job hopping.