Every fucking local bar around here has their 'specials' on given days. Where one bar would have Mondays and Wednesdays, another would have Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then, of course, there were the weekends where I almost felt obligated to go out drinking.
By no means have I ever blamed my friends or the bar schedules for my drinking. I want to make that clear. No, I blame my love for the taste and feel of drinking and being buzzed. It was like, "Oh hell yea, $3 beer night. Tomorrow is $3 shots, you call em!"
The cheap drinking was a way of justifying getting buzzed because of the deals. It also became the only way of hanging out with friends during winter, since there was no other fucking thing we did during the cold weather.
Then I lost my job:
No, it had nothing to do with my drinking. I was NEVER drunk or even slightly buzzed when working. The death of the economy drove the company that I worked for to cut 300 workers in the various stores including me.
Once unemployed, I went into online sales by selling various items on eBay and so on. It was a means of being independent from having some asshole boss pushing me around to being able to do what I want, and when I want. It was great, and the money as able to pay my bills the same way as I had been doing when working 40 hours a week.
The only problem was that with this new freedom, I found that I could do my job while drinking. Yeah, sounds wonderful, but that grew to a problem. Sure, I did the work I needed, and never missed sending out a bought item, but it made me think it was alright to have alcohol next to me.
This soon became the norm. Every night, I would slam back a couple of beers to wind down from a day of packing and shipping items, and would spend this time posting new auctions and what not.
It was great, but did slightly take away from my social life since I was more consumed with packing, shipping, and relisting that I stayed in most of my days.
Slowly, it became worse:
Though, I managed to get all of my tasks done to pay the bills, it kept me from living my life. Most of this was due to the drinking. Here was my day plan from start to finish...
- Wake up around noon with a slight hangover from the night before.
- Shit, shower, and shave.
- Make some kind of food whether it be left overs or whatever.
- Sit down at the computer looking at what I need to ship out.
- Package up the items, and have UPS or FedEx come pick them up. Sometimes would go drop them off depending on certain circumstances.
- Much of the rest of the day is spent doing odd jobs around the house and normal choirs.
- Once night hit, I'd sit down with my beer in hand and post up new auctions, reply to questions, etc. for the next day. I'd keep drinking until I either get to the point where I know I'm too drunk to post, or just plain tired.
- Go to sleep only to repeat everything over.
That soon turned into me buying the cheap shit beers that had had higher alcohol content, and buying bottles of almost whole grain alcohol that was dirt cheap rather than the expensive liquors. I went from Miller Lite to Natural Ice. I went from Cuervo to Everclear. Sure, I would mix the hard shit or spit at it, but I drank it because it was cheaper and got me buzzed faster.
I'll go further on the next post.
