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10

every year for the past 10 years on every oct 14th, i’ve posted a number on facebook. started with the simple 1. but that 1 was where things really started. what i never did was say what that number represented. if you knew, you knew. some did and replied as such. some thought one of the many jokes i make and made a joke. most had no idea.

i, however; never replied.

next year, 2. so on and so forth. now, oct 14th 2024, i get to post 10.

many of my friends today met me in the last 10 years, they only know “this” jerry.  10 years ago, it was another story all together. and it wasn’t pretty.

on oct 14th, 2014, i checked into the emergency clinic here in the colony. you see, if i got up and walked across the room i was out of breath and had to sit down, gasping for air til i got it back. i kept ignoring the symptoms cause in the end, i knew. it was time to address 18+ years of history.

an alcoholics history.

if you’ve gotten to know me in the last 10 years, you’ve never seen more than water, tea or sugar free red bull in my hands when out. if you knew me before, you never saw anything you couldn’t light on fire in my hands. and i don’t recommending lighting rumpleminsk bottles on fire to see the flame come shooting out.

especially if you’re not quick enough to move your thumb out of the way at the bottles opening. let’s not get into trying to fry your own pickles at 1am.

anyway, where was i?

as i was checking into the emergency clinic, i was actually asked what my religious preferences were. i mean, really? ok. well, if the worst should happen, i am not really religious, but please put me in a wooden canoe, push me out into a lake in the wilderness and shoot flaming arrows at me til i burn out and sink.

yea, viking style.  🙂

i really wish i had captured the look on her face. in some ways, that got me through the next few weeks. well, maybe the sense of humor part.

quick lab tests back and while i had issues common with alcoholism, my biggest issue was my heart was down to 16% strength. if you’re not in the medical field, that’s low. if you are, yes; i said 16%.

the question is, how do you let yourself get to that point in life? where 18 years is more a blur than a memory. at what point do you go from liking to drink to REALLY liking to drink to its all that really matters? when do you cross over? you don’t pick up a drink initially to become an alcoholic. but when you can’t put it down, you’re there.

you take the 1st decade in stride, i suppose. i mean, you just drink and can quit at any time. you just don’t want to. “i” didn’t want to. people ask, i just said “this is me, and i just like doing it”. you justify it by saying clever phrases like “while im taking years off my life, those are some pretty shitty years”.

gotta say “oops” on that one. these are actually my best years in a long, long time. but you don’t see that “potential” when you keep saying “one more night, i’ll worry about it tomorrow.” that gets pretty damn easy to say, ya know?

its when you’re days away from your last “tomorrow” you see things differently.

the combination of a successful career at microsoft with stock options flowing like candy and my own performance at the time being one of the higher ups had my bank doing ok. renting an office in las colinas for a year for an onsite radio station, calendar promotions, countless t-shits (wonder who but me still has those?) sponsoring bands and so forth takes a toll on stock options.

lets not even get into all the 80s arcade machines i had due to drunken ebay nights purchases. i bought some really cool shit while drunk. usually. much of it went into renegade radio, video equipment, cameras, bad investments in bottled mexican water…

again, you do strange shit when you are drunk after 7pm. 8pm at the latest. if you ever talked to me back then and wondered if i was drunk, yes. for the love of god, yes. sorry about that. let me know if i still owe you money.

but my time at microsoft saw a huge shift from why i loved it to what it became. im not going to get into it all, that isn’t the point. the point is, we changed. i had a hard time at the end with the “new” microsoft and simply put, we parted ways in 2012. somewhere around 2010 to 2014 were the darkest years of my life. my last several years at microsoft, looking back, was textbook depression. that’s a whole nother story for another time.

now, it was almost 2 years before i was employed again. i tried to make a profit at renegade and make it my career but it just isn’t there. i mean, where do YOU listen to music? and that’s fine. i still do this because it’s what got me through in the end.

it’s what i found to love and hold on tight. it’s something i did to take me away from everything else i didn’t understand. it’s what kept me going when drunk. it’s what my friends kept going for me when i couldn’t. that’s why they’re still my friends and back there somewhere waiting to do something cool here again someday.

but finding something to love is what kept me sane in those times. especially in the years before and after microsoft. i remember being alive. sort of. but you’d get me lying if you asked me for details. being alive is far from living, i found.

alcoholics don’t have many details. usually, it’s because we’re hiding our drinking. now, i never really hid that fact, but i didn’t broadcast either. some family knew cause they were a part of my day to day life. partied with me when coming down. if not around me, you likely didn’t know cause i don’t talk much about it or me.

family and friends would talk to me about it, but i was happy. i thought. “pay the price to be who you are” was my defiant battle cry. if this kills me, so be it. this is me.

you waver back and forth between challenging death and promising “this is my last night”. hell, you have thousands of last nights in a long career of alcoholism. you wake up the next morning and dump what’s left of that bottle just as you promised before passing out on the keyboard. but you hope “this time”.

at 8:50pm that night, you’re off to the liquor store to buy something you can light on fire and that 1.75 liter bottle will last you *almost* 3 days.

for 18 years.

give or take, cause like i said, it blurs. you lose track of time so damn fast in this mode. you never count the broken promises to yourself that tomorrow you’ll find it within what you couldn’t find tonight.

you tend to find a lot of comfort making promises like that. at the time, you have every intention of keeping it. you prove it by dumping the rest down the sink the next morning before you find yourself in the same position that very night. you recognize it cause you were doing it the night before. and before that.

and before that.

along with buying a ton of alcohol in these years, you also buy a lot of time. that is a HUGE trait of an addict, buying time. you sell yourself that those will be “shitty years” later in life, so drink now and party on by yourself most of the time. and get online and buy arcades.

and medieval armor. i bought really cool shit while drunk.

but time. you find excuses to buy time to quit tomorrow. that this is the last bottle, and you just need it for any given reason of the day. while you have every intention to quit “tomorrow” you also know it never comes, so you milk that word, tomorrow.

anyway, microsoft and i parted company after almost 20 years and the 2 years of unemployment that followed ended in september of 2014. 6 weeks after that, on oct 14th, 2014, i went to the emergency clinic and freaked out the nurse with my viking heritage. now realize that i was only employed 6 weeks at this point. i was in the hospital for 9 days watching my heart go 200 bpm+ for a few days. i would be out the next 6 weeks in recovery.

and things were just beginning at this point. you see, you acquire a few health issues drinking 18 years of flammable beverages. what was odd was, i didn’t feel the urge to drink when i got home.

i felt stupid. i felt shame. but somewhere back there i didn’t want to get drunk. for the most part, i was embarrassed to be in the position i put myself. alcoholism is a very slow form of suicide, really. i always thought i’d push it to the very edge and then quit and everything would be ok.

what i did feel at this time, for the first time in a long long LONG time, was hope. recovery was just beginning but finally the “not tonight” was possible. i “felt” how possible it was. life after alcohol was in my grasp and all i had to do was not let go. but isn’t that all i *ever* had to do? i just knew it was different this time. felt it.

now, life after alcoholism isn’t easy. you have a lot of things to both mentally and physically fix after that path of destruction you put yourself on. i lost a ton of weight back then (from 385 to 320) and life was great. my family never gave me shit for it; they knew i was doing it to myself for what i put myself through. but to find your way “home” you have to go through that hell.

there simply is no other way.

my weight did drop but it was too easy because of no alcohol, not actual eating habits or exercise really, so i put it all back and then some.

lord, and then some.

my work life took me back with open arms and was instrumental in my recovery. they could have easily said “no position open” when i was ready to return and i have no idea if i’d have stayed sober if that would have happened.

i’d like to think so.

in the immediate time after my release from the hospital, it was a lot of appointments with doctors for my various self-inflicted reasons. but what i never did was AA. no sponsor and no one to talk to. in the end, i simply faced my healing in the same manner as my attempted destruction.

alone.

but i never felt the urge to drink again. while in the hospital, the nurses even commented that i wasn’t going through withdrawals. maybe i was too embarrassed for that. but to this day i have zero issue in a bar with drinks flying all around.

you see, i knew i was done. it was over. i knew all too well what i’d wasted and i knew i could never get that back. and from what i read, the time it takes to heal from alcoholism is a year. at least a year before you try relationships. a year later i was still wondering what i wanted to be when i grow up. now i know what i want to do. i sure wasn’t ready for a relationship. then again, i’ve had so few of those, how did i really know?  when are you “healed” from all you truly did to yourself? when are you ok? when can you talk about it without losing it?

im at 10 years before i can post more than a number but i still keep “losing it” while writing it. in far too many ways it feels more like im remembering a movie than own past. i never talked about it previously like this because at the end of the day, i just didn’t want to. i marked my progress and kept on swimming, so to speak.

is that a good thing or bad?

beats the shit out of me. in the end, it’s just a number. 21, the number that represented how old i was before i ever got drunk. just a number. i honestly can’t even tell you when i went from social drinker to problem. that’s the problem, i suppose. you don’t really know you’re in too deep before you’re in too deep.

then you don’t want help. you don’t want much of a social life because they will make you stop drinking. yea, i told a date that once. god i was stupid. you run away from a lot of opportunity as an addict. in the end, no one but you can make you change.

and you have to be ready. you have to want to and it can’t be because you want to stop, it has to be because you want to start. start something else. something new. the road between the 2 is the hardest road ive ever been on. failed promises litter the landscape of my past. i won’t do that again, make those failed promises to myself or others.

my words and my life needs to be more than that. mean more.

10 years ago, i knew i was ready. other numbers include 200 to 60. that would be my heart rate in icu compared to today. 2 and 3. that would be the number of catheter ablations i had for afib and 3 the number of cardioversions for the same. 5 would be the number of times neither of those stopped it.

it seems i have a stubborn heart. i mean, it wouldn’t let even me kill it. lord knows i’ve tried in far too many ways to recognize what’s left of my heart at times. but it’s still there.

i can feel it.

recent numbers include 40 for my 40-year reunion. “several” for the number of friends i’ve gained by going to that reunion. 59, as in just turned 59 years old when hitting 50 wasn’t a given 10 years ago.

now my favorite numbers these days.

410 to 270

around the time covid hit, i was 410. i have to guess the 10 part because my scale and the scale at the pulmonologist stopped at 400. at this point in my life even breathing was a pain in the ass. i took myself to 350 lbs give or take and hit a wall. enter the decision to get the sleeve in december of last year.

270 is what i weighed today.

52 to 40 for jeans size.

new numbers are 245 for my goal weight. and with all the changes and self-inflicted challenges i’ve given me, i am so much closer to a goal weight i couldn’t even dream about 10 years ago. 3 years ago. even 2.

and all of these changes and challenges oddly enough have put me in a good position to take on other phobias i’ve had in life and see if i can a way through those. got a few friends helping. is singing in public the next challenge i face?

i never wanted to preach or tell people GO GET HELP. that never helped me so i don’t picture it helping someone else buying that time. i just wanted to tell my own story this year vs. post a number and keep moving.

if you’re an addict, you know you need to quit. you know your excuses are simply buying time. now, whether you’re an addict and need to quit, or are struggling with your own challenges in life, i leave you with 2 questions.

do you want to die this way?

if not, then how long are you going to let yourself live this way?

find what you love and let it save you.

 

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