While visiting family for Thanksgiving, I tagged along on a trip to the local state-run liquor store. We don’t have state stores where I live now, and while I know the system has its faults, state stores are appealing because they tend to be big and well-stocked. It’s like a department store for booze.

State stores take themselves pretty seriously, while still trying to meet the drinking needs of the entire local population. This results in funny little displays, like a shelf in the otherwise dignified wine department featuring every flavor of MD 20/20, lined up neatly in rows. Why is cheap alcohol so funny? I suppose it’s only funny to those who find humor in pathos. I’m still one of them, thank God.

I got a little maudlin at the state store. Browsing the aisles, I imagined each type of alcohol represented a different mood or facet of life -- all moods and facets I would never experience again. I’m really prone to this type of romantic nostalgia for drinking. I need to find a good way to defuse it. I tried to think of the bottles as hundreds of different ways to bring shit into my life, but I wasn’t having it.

In general, I think I need to focus more on positive reinforcement. Currently, when I catch myself romanticizing alcohol and missing drinking, my first reaction is to start a little PowerPoint presentation in my mind, featuring my most humiliating and heartbreaking drinking moments. But I’m starting to see that forcing myself to relive those moments makes me feel worthless and shitty and more like drinking (hell, what have I got to lose?) than a little nostalgia ever would. Once the bad images get in my head, it takes hours or even days to expunge them, and they make all the good and normal things I do feel like a joke.

I can vaguely see how a positive reinforcement system would work. For example, I often think about how I miss that feeling, at the beginning of a night out partying, that anything could happen and probably will. I could counter that with my PowerPoint presentation of non-fun crappy crap that actually did happen, or instead I could think about how wonderful it feels to wake up not hungover on a weekend morning with the whole day stretched out in front of me, and I can do anything. I could think about how I feel after finishing a long run -- disbelieving and exhilarated. I could think about my current, well-ordered life -- clean clothes, food in the fridge, money in the bank. These things are what I’ve gained, and I should focus on them as reasons to go forward, not drinking. Besides, everybody knows PowerPoint is just a way to make meaningless crap seem important.

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