Day 6 of the Dre Beltrami Challenge

Pobody's Nerfect

We’re doin it. WE’RE DOINNN ITTTTT.

Hello. If you are reading this, it came from this post from Dre Beltrami which I turned into a writer’s challenge. I also had to circle back to this one because I don’t really drink anymore and I had to gather materials and then get enough down to create a sensate buzz which was more than I’d expected. So here we go!

6. The Drunk Text Experiment

Pour yourself a drink (or three), open your Notes app, and start texting yourself a random stream of consciousness exactly how it’s coming out when you have a nice buzz going on. No backspacing, no thinking, no giving a fuck about grammar or sentence structure. The next day, clean it up just enough to make it readable… BOOM, your real voice is right there! That raw, unfiltered version of you is what we’re after.

Minus the Notes App

I actually don’t know how long I’ll have this buzz for so I’m skipping the Notes step and typing direct into Substack. I am in my condo alone, drinking water now but I was drinking homemade cocktail.

Twas: soju + Thai yakult + splash of soda water. Ice.

I had two like big water glasses of that and I tried to drink it fast so it would get me hippy dippy. Two (one?) nights ago I tried going out and getting the buzz but I ended up drinking too slowly and it was too much money to waste on a non-buzz so I gave up and came home. Did not feel like writing. Tonight though, I went to 7-11, I got some peach flavored soju, the Thai equivalent of yakult (I googled it), and some soda water for just a teensy bit of zzz. Plus like chips and stuff to snack on. I am aware that I am still mostly aware. That has more to do with my South Korean constitution and residual Control Freak than anything else. You see, I am not one for mind-altering substances. My mind is bendy enough with nothing trauma dumping all my feel-good neurotransmitters at once. The few times I’ve tried things, I was pretty disappointed with the results. I mostly felt anxious mentally and numb physically. Plus my hands wanted to do this weird claw-type clamping thing. And then with the inevitable mood crash that lasted like 2 weeks, I was like nah, fuck all that noise. Alcohol only does mildly better because I don’t usually feel the extremes of whatever was happening with stuff like molly or weed but it fucks with the inflammation in my body and my sleep and she do NOT like stuff that fucks with sleep. Sleep is life.

During the pandemic, that was a different story. Alcohol was my very best co-dependent toxic friend during the pandemic. I had just separated from my then husband. I was all alone with nowhere to go and nothing to do except be afraid and afraid and pissed off but then back to afraid. And my sister who was pregnant at the time was diagnosed with the big C. So to recap: I was overly anxious, lonely, and thoroughly garbage-minded about not being able to even HUG my sister going through some TERRIFIC SHIT. Luckily, I am 5 minutes from the bridge between Philly and Jersey and Jersey hardly gave a flying rat’s ass about lockdowns or sanitizing or acknowledging reality in general. And they had alcohol. Lots of it. So I would do border runs into Jersey, throw on two masks and sometimes gloves, head into a liquor store and buy CRATES of alcohol. Whole fuckin boxes. I learned to tolerate everything. I used to be a clear alcohol only type of gal. I liked sweet, fruity cocktails where the alcohol was more of a mixer than the point. Not so with the pandemic. I was an equal opportunity drunkard then. I held my brown, my clear, my rose, shit anything. I had collections of empty bottles. True story - I drank so many bottles I was later able to find a glass cutting studio near me to cut a matching set of 6 (with extras in case they broke) glass lowballs. Look at me all sustainable and shit.

I also had zero and I mean ZERO appetite. I just drank my calories. Sometimes straight from the bottle. I also weirdly got into working out regularly at that time. I think it was sheer boredom. There was stuff to binge-watch but sitting all day on the couch in various positions got to me and my gluteal muscles. I started queueing up YouTube videos by Pamela Reif and trying to follow along. It was some weird macho thing honestly. By the way, if you are trying to get into fitness, Pam will fuck you directly UP. 10 minutes? Ninja, please. You have never been in so much pain. It’s the longest goddamn 10 minutes of your LIFE aside from maybe active labor.

I had real concerns about the drinking. I brought them up with my therapist whom I met with virtually during that time period. I’d cry on camera. She’d have to walk me through breathing and visualization exercises. Man, I love my therapist. She got me through some very fuckin dark times. I doubled down in sessions. She told me that everyone, EVERYONE, was in survival mode. That we were all scared and nobody knew anything. That we all had to find our own ways to cope. Some people stopped shaving and took up guitar or sourdough baking. Other people had less healthy ways of coping but that it was temporary. And the fact that I was worried that I was drinking too much was a sign that I was clearly aware of what I was doing and that it wasn’t a compulsion. Survival, not a tsk-tsk behavioral pattern and other such hits as, “Focus on putting one foot in front of the other,” and, “Let’s reframe the situation.”

I often went to my friend’s house to drink in her basement and crash there. Just for some fuckin company. We hung out so frequently we considered ourselves to be “same household” status when that came out to be a thing. So whilst I sobbed on her shoulder about my divorce, she would hand me bottles or cans, ply me with food that I’d pick at. I would hug her minidoodle? Poodiddle? Whatever the dog was. She would pour me onto the couch in her basement and cover me in fluffy blankets to sleep it off. They’d leave me there until I got it together enough to go home even when they had other things to do (she and her husband). They had an autolocking door so they’d go about their business and leave me to it.

And wouldn’t you know. I found out that my South Korean genes gave me a kind of superpower. My tolerance for alcohol became tremendous. Two whole bottles of wine on an empty stomach? Child’s play. Half a bottle of small-batch barrel proofed neat whiskey? Yerp. Vodka, rum, soju, with nary a mixer? Bet. Full sentences, clear-eyed, sure-footed, steady-handed, all that shit. I could’ve gone out and negotiated a corporate merger Madmen-stylez. Meanwhile, I was barely not crying.

At some point during those chaotic times, a video goes viral of someone hugging his grandma through a shower curtain. Bro, we ALL cried. My sisters, knowing how hard I’d been taking this “don’t-touch-anybody-or-even-get-near-them-or-everyone-dies” thing come to visit me to console me. Keep in mind, my one sister had cancer. CANCER. She comes to console me. They don’t stay long, we all sit in separate corners of the living room and chat a little. Then they throw a blanket over me and hug me and I sob, SOB, like the suffocating furred baby ghost that I am. Real talk? I’m choking up a little thinking about it now. My sisters know that I’m the touchy feely one of the family. Always have been. Bed spoonsies, heavy leans, and butt pats were my hallmark. I’m the kind that does the little hug n’ dance, the clandestine hair sniff, the mildly inappropriate bit squeeze. I mean, not anymore. That habit has long been broken and thrown into the flaming trash heap. But once upon a time…

My tolerance for alcohol has since mostly normalized because, voila! I did pull away from drinking once things, and I, got better. I started eating solid food again. I saw people again. My sister’s cancer was treated and went into remission. People weren’t dying so much that the daily toll wasn’t reported alongside the fuckin weather forecast; their personal effects taking up so much space it filled whole patient rooms in hospitals from front to back, top to bottom a la concentration camps. But every now and again, I’ll order a drink socially and sink back into the familiar oddness of not-quite-feeling all my feelings whilst still maintaining complete control of every functional faculty and harken back to a time, not so long ago, when it was a staple and a kind of comfort, like a deadbeat parent or mind-controlling fungal infection.

I still do the odd Pamela Reif video.