Sometime in July, or was it August, I resolved to quit drinking alcohol, or wine. At the start of the pandemic, convinced that there would be a run on alcohol stores, I had bought several bottles of alcohol thinking that society would devolve into bartering any day now. In those early days I had any number of ideas of what would happen, and so did many others (and some of the strange people over on the "PandemicPreps" subreddit, prepping to this day for a second toilet paper run that has not happened). Funny enough, I didn't actually drink this alcohol as had been my wont previously. I even bought a bottle of St Germain which, strictly speaking, was not kosher certified, thinking any port in a storm (heheh). But once my illness began, my concerned parents took all the booze home (with my approval), and thus began my teetotalism.
At first, it was unwilling, and difficult. I lacked the impulse control to avoid wine; in fact one of my Shabbat rituals, besides for the traditional rushing to do all the preparation in the last 45 minutes, was to buy a bottle of wine at HEB and drink it all in one swoop (typically), or half on Friday night, half on Saturday night. Inured as I was to the effects of alcohol, having a miserably high tolerance, this was just fine. I was also at a stage in my life where chips went well with alcohol, especially high-alcohol double- or triple-IPAs, and that pairing dogged me throughout the days, as did the ensuing weight gain.
In August I decided, let's make it till the end of the month without wine. It wasn't easy, but I made it till Rosh Hashanah before drinking wine with my parents. Sukkot was an exception, and then I kept at it, drinking maybe two bottles of wine and perhaps a couple of beers in between then and now. And most unusually, as I noticed when I drank two cans of beer this past Thursday, between July and December I'd lost the taste for chips. To get high, or low, I'd much rather have a bag of oranges and some bubbly water. My alcohol tolerance dropped, a thing I had not believed possible, and I stopped taking a detour through the chips & candy aisle at the groceries, daring my consciousness to resist while my eyes devoured the puffy bags of salty goodness.
Tonight I had a bottle of stout, one of those very high-alcohol versions that always comes out during the "holiday" time of year, of Goose Island brewery fame, or whatever. I posted a comment on Facebook that someone else found rude and decided to correct me on it. Thus it was that I re-discovered my tendency to make combinations of words that may seem positive but really aren't. I became despondent upon realizing how I'd spent time drinking and eating raspberry iced pops while watching the last season of Bojack Horseman instead of reading up on red-team infrastructure for a meeting tomorrow. And it wasn't until I went for an extremely belated walk that I realized that the beer had an effect that was very unusual: it made me sad. In years past, if I wanted to be sad (such as after yet another breakup with someone I thought I knew only through the voices of the phone speaker), I'd drink cups and cups of water, fearing the levity that would come with beer. But now, it seems, from a happy drunk I've become a sad drunk, as if the beer shattered an illusion of a life I had constructed, free of the worries of a pandemic-full world, where deaths and egotism wreak havoc on the psyche of anyone who isn't materialist or selfish. Those things did not concern me; I had a bike, a garden, friends, work, books. But the beer had other plans. Who knows what troubles might lie in the murky depths of a chocolate stout?
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