Glasses Half Empty

(Alternate title: on the other side of drunk.)

Just a few more notes on the current austerity measures here. When I was in Paris, my homie Pierre decided that he was only going to drink when he was socializing, because otherwise he would drink all the damn time. Pierre, being made of sterner stuff (plus dur, bien sur...) than I am, stuck to his guns. I thought this was a great idea as well, until I realized after about a week how shit-bored I was most evenings, sitting around in my tiny apartment on the Ile St. Louis, and I made the educated decision to get back to drinking wine and watching movies on Chinese pirate sites.*

About 1.2 years later, I'm sitting around my tiny apartment on the Ile Santa Cruz, sober as a Turk, thanks to the intervention of blood pressure and triglycerides (and the women who love them.) The problem with sobriety is that, for people like me, life itself doesn't pack much in the way of sparkle. I'm grateful for the ongoing availability of air, water, and low-salt, home-cooked foods, but I'm skeptical about any kind of imminent mental transformation (or, I suppose, an immanent mental transformation, either...but that would be redundant) that would see me joyfully skipping around, celebrating the virtues of the chemically-unaltered human condition.

But, then, that's the good thing about getting the hard word from the docs: this isn't up to me and my willpower any more. It's about hanging around for several more decades for the benefit of my daughter to-be and other people I'm very fond of.

* Compare to the famous refrain from Trainspotting: "At, or around this time, Spud, Sick Boy and I made a healthy, informed, democratic decision to get back on heroin as soon as possible."