I had two particularly striking but very different thoughts about drinking this week. The first occurred to me in the middle of my swimming class. I realized I was no longer totally incredulous of my not drinking. I used to feel like my sober life was a kind of bright but ominous enchantment, and if I winked the right way or said the magic word I�d find myself back in my �real� or �regular� life. I don�t feel quite that way anymore. That�s not to say I�m not still amazed and slightly appalled.

The second thought -- or maybe it was more of a feeling -- hit me during a long run out in the suburbs. It was early evening and I was trudging through a neighborhood of small older houses and many flowering trees and bushes. The sidewalk was cracked and all the houses had porches, some with swings. As I ran, I was overcome by the feeling, or almost the knowledge, that I had to, absolutely had to, sit on a porch on an early summer evening like this one with a drink in my hand sometime again in my life -- I had to know I was going to be able to do that or I just couldn�t go on, not just with the run but with everything. And so I told myself I would, I would someday sit on that porch and drink and watch the world go by.

It�s funny. I think exercise is similar to alcohol in that both can provoke these kind of overwhelming, emotion-laden �realizations� that later seem faintly ridiculous and a lot less compelling. Sometimes at the gym I find myself getting teary over telephone commercials. I mean, yes, the existence of porches and summer evenings will always be a threat to my sobriety. But so is almost everything and I�ll deal with it.

I�ve had a lot of more useful realizations and revelations since I quit drinking. This journal is a chronicle of them. Sometimes it feels like my brain is running too hard. I can�t have a quiet mental moment. I think this might be a common phenomenon in early sobriety. I�m reading �A Fan�s Notes� by Frederick Exley. The narrator, a habitual heavy drinker, has checked into an emergency room and the nurse is questioning him about entering AA:

�Quite frankly� I wasn�t sure I wanted to live without an occasional binge. But I couldn�t go into this with Mrs. C., knowing that her argument would be that there was no such thing for me anymore as an occasional binge. Though I respected the validity of this argument, it didn�t assuage my need for drink. After a month�s sobriety my facilities became unbearably acute and I found myself unhealthily clairvoyant, having insights into places I�d as soon not journey to. Unlike some men, I had never drunk for boldness or charm or wit; I had used alcohol for precisely what it was, a depressant to check the mental exhilaration produced by extended sobriety.�

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