adventures in sobriety

Today is my three-month anniversary of my sojourn into Soberland. I wonder how much longer this is going to continue.

In honor of this milestone, I booked my air tickets to the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where I'll be going in March. I'll arrive on Friday the 13th. It will be my first solo travel expedition, not counting my journey to Charleston.

Yesterday with Lucho I was forced to articulate a weird battle that has been raging in my head since beginning these adventures in sobriety, which is the ambiguity of living in the moment v. planning for the future. The Drunk Life is largely about living in the moment, and so are my short-term love affairs, including the Joe situation. The preliminary struggles with sobriety were about living in the moment as well, and the critical AA mindset of taking it one day at a time. But long-term sobriety is about changing your lifestyle, your life, and that is about planning for the future. It's about, oh, you know, maturity and shit. I'm not really good at thinking about the future. My mind reacts to thinking about the future like a bad organ transplant. This.will.not.do. It's still the same effect of not drinking, only the motivations are shifting from a daily affair from a long-term strategy, and suddenly everything feels like it's shifting along with it, Joe included, and this is why suddenly after spending every day with him I've not seen him all week, and I'm experiencing a renewed crush on My Friend, and a sudden fierce pining for Ex.

Yesterday Lucho took me to an affair full of successful people our age. At one point I looked down and my backpack, with a camera tripod attached to it, was sitting next to some dude's motorcycle helmet, and it made me miss Ex so badly that I left five minutes later, even though I was having a fine sober time, and had finally figured out what to do with my hands: eat cookies.