Rarely do I have cravings to use drugs and alcohol. On those rare occasions, my urge to refrain from abstaining will last mere minutes and my day will carry on as usual. Generally speaking, my triggers (the people, places, and things that cause a desire to use) like driving by bars, smelling cigarette smoke, or hearing a beer commercial on my way home from work don't have too much effect on me.
Today it was something different. It happened at work and it stuck with me for hours. I was running the drink menus for Granite City Food and Brewery, and the pictures of delicious beer passed in front of my eyes just over six hundred times as I fed the sheets through my U.V. coating machine.
I like beer. I love beer. I love the flavor of hopps in particular and I kept seeing the Hoppy Flight which is a sampler of four delicious looking beers, all with beautiful colors and nice foamy heads. I could taste the hops. My mouth went dry, and I began to sweat.
Today it was something different. It happened at work and it stuck with me for hours. I was running the drink menus for Granite City Food and Brewery, and the pictures of delicious beer passed in front of my eyes just over six hundred times as I fed the sheets through my U.V. coating machine.
I like beer. I love beer. I love the flavor of hopps in particular and I kept seeing the Hoppy Flight which is a sampler of four delicious looking beers, all with beautiful colors and nice foamy heads. I could taste the hops. My mouth went dry, and I began to sweat.
It's the picture in the middle that got my brain working.
I envisioned myself sitting at the bar, the bartender himself much like Sam from Cheers: hand drying the cleaned mugs while he listened to my fascinating story about how I was the guy that laminated these very menus as I sat there and enjoyed four small beers then politely waved off another round. Yep, I was just a normal guy stopping in after work to try out a new pub.
What I didn't envision, and we never do when we romanticize our use, is reality. What the fuck could I possibly do with four little glasses of beer? I'll have another round. That's just a teaser and now that my face is feeling warm I think there's room for dessert (Tequilla) and maybe my boss at the laminating factory is an idiot, and yeah I can have one more round (of beer & tequilla) and who the hell do you think you are looking at me like that? Is that not a reasonable place to put my vomit? I'm never coming back here again! What the hell did I do last night? Where are my..... Oh my god is that my car out there? I can afford to take today off of work to recover (drink excessively). And on, and on, and on it goes.
Fortunately for me, I've spent roughly 10 months now preparing for days like this. I realized what I was doing and simply stopped it. I looked at the beers on the menu as work I had to complete, not a potential after work mishap. Tonight I will meet my sponsor before my meeting and talk with him about it, and he will give me his advice and it will be over with, just like this post.
