Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Are You Serious?

Got some news today. Good news.

I snagged a job as assistant manager of a NH liquor store.

Think about how bizarre that is.

I began a love affair with alcohol at the age of fifteen. Got drunk for the first time in 1969 and never looked back. I have continued a spiritual relationship with booze for 44 years. Sometimes the booze called the shots, sometimes I called the shots. Played around with drugs here and there but booze gave me exactly what I needed. I'll take booze any day over any drug. (Except love).

Learned physicians would scream to the heavens that my relationship with booze is extremely unhealthy. I think they are quacks. Even when booze was calling the shots, there was something there, some sort of guidance that booze provided to keep me from running off the rails.

In the past eight months I have scaled back whiskey consumption dramatically. Carol would never agree to this but she is not objective. If she sees me raise a glass to my lips she jumps up from the couch and calls every twelve step program in New England begging them to admit me.

I don't blame her. I did this to her. There was a time, going back beyond eight months, when I would have a glass in my hand before I took my coat off. And that glass would stay refilled until I fell asleep (passed out).

I don't do that anymore. Not even close. But she can't see it.

Anyway, considering my history with booze, imagine my amazement two and a half years ago when I found myself with the keys to a liquor store along with the alarm code and the combination to the safe.

Who could believe it.

Imagine my amazement today to be poised to call myself assistant manager of a liquor store.

How bizarre, how bizarre.

Here's the irony of the last seven years. I left accounting in December of 2005 to get happy. Thought bartending was a chance for me to excel at something I could dig, and make money.

Didn't work out (although I was a damn good bartender). I began hopping around like a flea at any opportunity that came around. Desperate to find happiness in work.

Didn't work out. I was even more unhappy than when I played an accountant on TV. I was one with the 99.9% of the people in the world for whom work equals hatred and results in poverty. The number of people who love what they do is minuscule. Lots of people say they love their jobs; most of them lie. People say what they think they are expected to say; they say anything that doesn't make them look weak.

I thought I was smart enough to find a work path to happiness. I am not.

So after seven years of earning half of what I used to earn, of struggling financially and worrying with every single breath, I have come full circle.

This job will not make me happy. Except to know that my deeply loving wife will not have to wake in fear ever single goddamn morning. We can be ourselves again. We can stop eating cat food and cut back to just cat snacks every once in a while.

A brief aside: Eating cat food was not pleasant, although the food was no worse than what the Olive Garden serves. But eating on all fours gave me a valuable perspective. I shall continue to do that.

The timing is unbelievable. February 12 marks our 35th wedding anniversary. THIRTY FIFTH.  Of all the things that tortured my soul with reminders of how painfully we were struggling, our anniversary was one of the biggest.

We settled every year. For affordable restaurants. Sometimes for no restaurants at all. No gifts. February 12th ripped my guts out every year.

Not this year. We will go out to eat wherever the hell we want. I will pamper my wife and be gentle and considerate and grateful for her putting up with a silly seven year odyssey that caused her a great deal of pain.

And that's just the beginning. She will be sixty this year. Her birthday was the other thing that flopped my guts on the ground. I could never spoil her.

This year she gets it all. All my love, all my attention, all my gratefulness. And a damn nice present.

That's what this job means to me. Ain't got nothing to do with ego or career or accomplishment or pride.

This job will give me the chance to restore dignity to our life. It will give me the chance to say thank you to my wife who endured the fantasy of my dreams, who never gave me sh** about it, who suffered silently.

Time and circumstances change your perspective. If you are willing, you can learn.

Gonna be a hell of a year.

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