Tuesday, April 3: The Buddhist mentality.

I don't have such a good feeling about this anymore.  Woke up with terrible sense of foreboding, gloom and doom.

Chris called me at work to see if day two was off to a good start.  We had a really good conversation about the whole thing and it did make me feel better.  Chris is really good with this stuff and he himself has been good and sober (and happy) since 2007.

Tried to rally myself at work by pulling up a quick article or two on Ryan Adams and his clean and sober life.  Ryan did it and he appears to not wish he was dead.  It's not like I drank half as much as him, probably not even a tenth.  In fact, my drinking was generally quite reasonable, down to just a couple drinks in the evenings, generally speaking, except for Sunday.

Charlie sent me an email at work today explaining how happy he was about the prospect of our new wholesome lifestyle.  He proceeded to use the word wholesome throughout our correspondence the rest of the day which really began to bug me.  Later that evening I finally vocalized my protest to general overuse of the word wholesome, explaining that for me the word draws up unpleasant images of perhaps overtly religious Quaker types who don't drink caffeine or soda and sit around eating hard boiled eggs and raw veggies handpicked from their back yard sanctuaries.

I explained to Charlie that I was having a really hard time dealing with the prospect of having nothing to look forward to anymore.  I already gave up the hard stuff in 2005.  I gave up the ciggies over a year ago, and have been meagerly subsisting on two little 100 piece boxes of the nicotine chewing gum per week.  And now alcohol, the last little coping mechanism I had to cling to, is gone.

He seemed a bit taken aback by the extent of my misery and despair and suggested I embrace the Buddhist mentality by not clinging to things so much.  I got a bit bristly with that, explaining I hate Buddhists because they don’t need anyone or anything and I find that level of detachment impersonal and unsettling.  I want someone to care if I die, and I want to care if somebody else dies.  I made some point about a Buddhist not caring if their dog dies as they merely watch their feelings float off like big, billowy clouds.  He said he thought a Buddhist would care if their dog died.