Drink, Drunk, Drank.
A couple of years ago when I realized my marriage was over, one of my first thoughts was, “Now I need to stop drinking.” I didn’t think, “Who will love me now?” or “How are my kids going to handle this?” I thought, “Shit, I have to stop drinking.” The thing is, I don’t think I was an alcoholic and I don’t think alcohol broke my marriage, but I did like to drink, and something about my drinking had been bothering me for years. Like almost every morning after some rousing night out with friends, I’d wake up and think, “I’ve got to stop.” And it wasn’t because I’d done anything wrong the night before, but it did have something to do with waking up tired or hung over in the midst of a big life with a family and a business and students and friends – everything I cared about. Sometimes I hadn’t even had too much to drink, or maybe I’d had one drink too many. Sometimes I didn’t drink for weeks. It was confusing. At times it felt like I had a problem, other times not. I’d make deals with myself; I’d only drink on weekends. I’d carry a little pocket-sized sign alerting my friends that I could only have one, and could they please remind me when I’m ordering my second? And if I did manage to only have one, I’d make sure to have it on an empty stomach so I could feel the buzz doubly big. My mother – a champ of a drinker – taught me that. None of those schemes worked,...
But Was it Life Changing?
“Was it life changing?” my daughter, Zoe asked me this morning as I groggily sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee. I’d gotten home from nearly three weeks in South Africa the night before, had managed a few hours of sleep, and was now on my third cup of coffee and it wasn’t even 7am. “Was it life changing?” “Yes and no,” I said. “Yes, of course, and no, not really.” And it’s not because I’m jaded by my recent travel to Bali last November, Nepal this past April, and the last many weeks in South Africa where I traveled with my 21-year-old daughter Ruby, and my 79-year-old mother Suzy. It was incredible to tool around in a jeep on a large private animal reserve in South Africa and to stumble into a herd of elephants taking down trees for breakfast. It silenced me to get as close as we did to the pride of lady lions whose faces were covered with blood – “lipstick,” our guide called it – after they’d just taken down an impala – a kill we’d seen them circling for, heard them attacking deep in the bush, and watched them emerge from afterwards. It was ridiculously amazing to watch a mama rhino and her baby lumbering along a shady dirt road, taking their time as our vehicle kept a safe distance behind. The closest I’d ever gotten to these animals – cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, leopards – was in magazines or on T.V., and it was both oddly wonderful and disconcerting to be so close to them. One day we drove right up to a...
This is How it Starts
So while it took me 24 hours to physically get home from Bali – to fly from Denpasar International Airport to Hong Kong, and then on to San Francisco – it only took me about 10 minutes in the car the next day to become some wild eyed impatient bitch who was half an inch from leaning on her horn because some dude in front of her wouldn’t turn right at the red even though he COULD HAVE.
“Oh my god,” I thought, slowly pulling my hand back from the wheel, “so this is how it starts.”
The Parting of the Veils
I keep wanting to text my younger brother Wally, who is recovering from surgery in Los Angeles. I keep wanting to ask him, “What’s it like now?” to find out if he’s still standing in the light that shone when the veils parted two weeks ago, when a football sized tumor…