I’ve spent my life around drunks. Even tried out for the team several years in a row, yet, never moved up to varsity from JV.

Sure – I gave it a good go. Suited up for many years, but just couldn’t elevate myself into full-fledged drunkdom. Something kept holding me back. It’s quite possible that my heart just wasn’t in it.

Now – don’t get me wrong. I really tried. Honestly. There were long periods of time through many of my most formative years where I really gave it my all.

Face down in the yard at parties… after epic benders – falling out of strangers cars into my driveway… periodically waking up parked in the front yard in my own. I can recollect countless scenarios where I should have died. My recklessness, joined at the hip with fleeting youth, could have, and quite frankly should have cost me my life on several occasions.

While my story and experiences might be unique to me, the collection of horrors, real and imagined, are in no way unique. At some point – anyone who spends their life buoyant in a bottle or a barroom will ultimately end up telling stories very similar, if not identical, to those of mine and many others.

It’s quite easy to slip into using the term “drunks” pejoratively. After all – most of the time drunks are ever being discussed – it’s usually after some drunk, or a group of them have done something entirely stupid. People tend not to use the term unless they are speaking negatively about a person or a group of people collectively.

However I may have honored the title in my younger days, I’ve grown to a point where I see it more as a damaging, “scarlet letter” moniker, certainly not one I’d prefer to be known by. I recall a time where I’d quite freely laugh at drunks. Now, it brings me little more than pity and sorrow to watch someone expend most of their energy, strength and dignity attempting to stay upright beneath the increasingly heavy weight of the crown.

If a drunk is just sitting at the bar doing what he or she does best and not bothering anyone, it’s a pretty good bet they’re going to fly under the radar. Though saying, “They’re not hurting anybody by sitting there drinking their life away.” would in most cases be categorically wrong. Someone, somewhere is paying the price for their behavior. I say that with the greatest conviction. There are no victimless drunks.

I’ve had a lifetime of club-level front row seats from which to witness the ugliness and destructive consequences of the use, and abuse of alcohol. I’m no reformed teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination. I still drink. I always have, and there’s a good chance I might drink until the day I drop. I was literally born into it, and have spent a lifetime running into and out of its warm embrace.

The picture at the beginning of this piece – is of yours truly – headed home from the hospital after coming down the canal. The first sights, sounds and smells for me – were the same as what you might find at any small pub or family owned watering hole of the day – the splashed beers, the clinking of glasses, the smell of stale tobacco (another of my life-long accoutrements) among other things.

I don’t in any way want to imply that the woman holding me in the photo is a drunk, or had anything to do with me practicing to become one for so many years – but the photo of the event itself has me wondering if my unexplainable attraction to restaurants and bars didn’t begin at this very moment in time.

Beginning somewhere around twelve or thirteen years after this photo was taken, I would spend the next 4 decades descending into – and trying to navigate back out of and away from – the toxic, lonely and isolated world that alcohol seems to so easily, readily, and quite reliably bring.

I’ve wanted to write about my experiences for a while. I hope to do that here, as well as write about many others.

Rather than a full recounting of past exploits, anecdotes and play-by-play of my many years dangling my face beneath a steady stream of fermented and distilled beverages – it is my journey out into the light that I wish to document and share with others. It’s quite possible there’s a cathartic payoff for me secluded somewhere in the process. One that might help me better visualize my own life by sharing it with someone else.

Mostly I want to share it with those who might most need to hear it… Those who do not yet believe, or have never witnessed that there is a life out there beyond the walls of the mental prison brought on by years of never ending alcohol consumption. Walls that perennially get higher, each drop slowly hardening the mortar over time, and more quickly with each great debauch.

Addiction and abuse are always such terrible labels. Not that either deserve a positive spin. I would just like to live in a world, where we see people dealing with these issues as ill and in need of help – not as people needing to be labeled and tamped down further into the crevasse. Rather, one of the major guiding lights leading out of the darkness is simple, gentle humanity. And it often seems in short supply for those requiring it the most.

If it weren’t for the steadfast compassion, kindness and understanding of others, I may have never been able to reach these observations and eventually gain the courage to share them openly. I do so in hopes that at least one other person may survive. If I can change a single life – save a single life – it will go a long way toward repaying those who saved mine. I might not be “saved” in some people’s sense of the term – but rest assured – where I am now, compared to where I’ve been – could easily be deemed quite utopic.

It took me a great many tries, and I got some help along the way, but I was able (with much struggle) to finally start weaning myself from the slow-drip death-grip of a bar stool. I still visit, and occasionally spread my ass cheeks across one for a few hours – but it’s different now. Something is different. The feeling just isn’t the same any more. Hopefully in the future, I can write about the things that lead me to view that world differently.

I just want to shout from the mountaintops for any and all to hear – that you will not die by walking away from the in-crowd and charting your own course, effectively shunning those who elect to remain… but you most certainly will, literally or figuratively, and most likely both, if you do not.

Stay tuned…