Day zero

And so we start again from scratch. I got drunk again last night and it was bliss. I loved and hated being in that dark pit once again. But the count for the days sober begins again from zero.

The reason (and it's a reason, not an excuse) is the wife! She pushed and poked that I could not handle the condescending insulting manner in which she speaks to me and her continuous high pitched shrieking and shouting across the house. After a long kak day to come home to some peace and try to get some work done on my business to get that, just knocked me over the edge of sanity. (Wife was off, on leave, but I had to come home and wash the dishes from the night before too! I mean, WTF???) My poor Tammy came to me in tears twice for the same reason that I took to the bottle - being yelled at and belittled. I felt so sorry for her but against that tyranny I am unfortunately powerless, confronting it only aggravates it to a louder higher pitched shrieking and a deeper level of of abuse and insult and further reminder of what she pays for and I don't.

I am ashamed that my resolve weakened to the point that I deliberately drove to the bottle store, purchased a bottle of whiskey and went home and consumed more than half of the bottle. Even worse, when I got home I actually chose not to drink and just left the bottle in the kitchen since the drive out of the house did calm my nerves, but after half an hour of listening to wife yelling at Tammy it drove me mental even over the sound of my heavy metal music in my office behind a closed door! Walking to that bottle and pouring a drink was almost automatic, like a surreal parasite taking control of my movement and mind.

This is my biggest challenge with the drinking, and the reasons I drink! All the other triggers and cravings I've been managing to handle and stave off the urge to drink, but the way the wife speaks to me and treats me in a way that makes me feel useless and worthless and insignificant and nothing more than a pointless irritation worthy of the worst of her insults and humiliations, the way that makes me feel all too often drives me to care little enough to want to drink to get drunk to escape. She hurts me in ways I cannot describe, and she does not know because she does not care. All she cares for is how she feels and what the point of her thoughts are and how whatever is happening affects her.

I will not be the instigator in breaking up my family no matter how hard she pushes or how deep she drives that stake into my heart. But apart from drinking I do not know how to deal with this incessant emotional bullying. I cannot fight back because of course physically is not an option and words only make it worse and earn more insults and hurtful comments. Nothing I have to say means anything nor is even heard, no matter if my opinion is expressed in a calm rational discussion or a raging frustration-fueled temper explosion. There's only one side that counts for anything and it's never mine. She even sometimes has the audacity to ask why I don't tell her how I feel, yet when I do she is so disinterested she does not hear a word. At times, especially in the car, travelling to work or back I'll talk to her then realise she's texting on her phone or sleeping and has not heard anything I've said.

Yet somehow I am always to blame. It's always turned around that it's about what I'm doing wrong or how she has been wronged or how it affects her. She has no more compassion for me as her husband, and I believe there is no love left either. She cares nothing for me unless it affects her, and if it affects her negatively then I get the wrath of hell bourne down on my head.

I do not know what to do about this, or how to escape the degrading humiliation of constantly being made to feel so worthless. To the point that I sit here writing shit like this pitying myself, hating myself and the miserable life I have landed up being forced to live, sharing it with a self-obsessed person determined, whether deliberately or not, to imprison me in the belief that I am nothing and will never be anything other than a pathetic useless piece of shit with few uses worthy of keeping around!

This is how I feel. I can't tell you the things that went through my mind over the course of that horrible horrible hour long hellish drive to work this morning in that claustrophobic little car with not a single word spoken between us. Every second was a painful hell as a million dark, sad things went through my head.!

Once I have calmed down and my blood has stopped boiling I will probably read this and feel a bucket load of guilt and shame for feeling and thinking this way and I will probably delete this blog post so I do not get into trouble and earn myself another long lecture and threats of divorce and having my beloved daughter taken away from me as punishment for being upset and saying the wrong things, and rightly so, I do not want to lose my Tammy. If it were not for her being in my life one of two things would have happened a long time ago: 1) wife and I would have parted ways, or 2) I would have taken my own life. No, I carry on and suck it up with something of a smile for Tammy, I live for that child, everything I do is for her and I will stick around and fight for her and take the abuse and emotional bullying so that she is not taken from me through selfish spite.

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Skip an hour
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Ok I'm over that rant now, though still absolutely resentful that I am sitting here with a hangover again after working so hard, holding out 10 long days without getting pissed. It's the longest in my adult life, at least for many years that I can remember, that I've boon sober. Sounds disgusting, I know, but that gives me hope that next time I can make it even longer, depending on how strong I can hold myself against the demons within that break my spirit to the point of soaking my soul in more of Satan's nectar.

I find myself once again considering the option of seeing a psychologist, or therapist, or the like. If only there were such an option that I could afford! Not the marriage counselor that wife keeps threatening, but somebody who might be able to help me get out of this darkness.

On the up side, my bottle labels have arrived in Cape Town, I will go and fetch them later. Can't wait. Andre who supplied them called me earlier, such an awesome guy! 200 of each label, for free!

Woo hoo I can start selling sauces soon!

Only setback now is getting the website up and running. Last night my other enormous frustration was being unable to progress on my website because my internet at home was impossibly slow at the best of times, it was completely non-existent most of the time. as my website is a Wordpress eCommerce site hosted on a remote web server the entire development happens over the internet, so when my internet at home is not functional I cannot do any work. I know it's because the fucked up useless ISP's in this backwards country throttle the bandwidth during peak hours through their "fair usage" policies but they throttle so badly that it simply does not work! The incompetence of these companies is costing us small business guys, but I know that fibre networks are coming to my area, when that happens I will ditch my current ISP and the Telkom line provider and never touch those fuckers again! Later in the evening when people in the area obviously went off their internets and my bandwidth improved I was too drunk to understand the complicated code of today's web development to do anything useful so the whole evening was a complete productive void. That infuriated my urge to drink even more, though I would not have drank in the first place if not for the wife!

I need to do my job, this blogging at work will get me into shit if it takes up too much time. I need to, it helps my sanity, but I also need to balance it with the need to earn my meager paycheck at the end of the month!

Day 10

Well at least these numbered days for blog headings takes away the need to think up some quirky (more like cheesy) heading for each blog post! I can easily waffle off pages and pages of a lot to do about very little but thinking of the name gets me stumped. Like naming a sauce or a business idea or a new dog or whatever. I'll tell you all about it bit don't ask me what it's called!

Day 10 and still I've not had a drink. Not much else to say on the matter today.

I will tell you about my lunch though - rather messy toasted sandwiches on brown bread with tuna, cream cheese, mayo, salt and some of the habanero sauce I made in December, which is nice and mature and rather strong. It's a delicious sandwich!

So both of my sauces now have labels designed and are being printed and shipped to the company's offices in Cape Town in the next day or two. By the weekend I'll have a stack of sauces bottled and ready to sell. Can't wait to have an actual tangible stock of products ready for purchase by actual paying customers. And this will be the start of many! Thanks to that break I mentioned in yesterday's post!

The website is also coming along, albeit slowly, it's taking shape and shouldn't take too long to go live. I'm building it on Wordpress using the Woothemes eCommerce infrastructure. The cooler themes and extensions are expensive so I'm limited to the free version of the software which is quite limited so it's a lot of time and work to get it doing what I need.  I don't get much opportunity to work on it, and sometimes the odd moment I do get in peace on my computer at home gets hijacked by a family member the moment I get up off my chair. Last night it happened again and I was furious, not just because my limited time was stolen, but because I was treated as if the work that I need to do in my time on my equipment is unimportant and inconsequential compared to whatever anybody else needs to do! I'm trying to build a business, with very little knowledge or support and zero capital to outsource things like finances, marketing, building websites etc, so each development day lost is one day further away that an income can be generated. But who cares what I think! Those are the blood-boiling moments that I would usually go and drink, especially when being viciously insulted for getting upset, and I feel my resolve is deliberately being tested to see how far my limits stretch before breaking! But I will not! I will not allow more time to be wasted being drunk and unproductive even if my precious productive time is taken by other means!

On another note, this morning I came up with another business idea, off-shooting from my sauces, it's relatively simple in concept and once my business is going will generate additional revenue through relatively little effort. BUT, I think this is relatively unique in this industry and quite a risky idea to be stolen and jeopardized, so until such time as it's been set up and tested I will absolutely not give any clues as to what this idea is! It could flop into oblivion or it could make me stupidly wealthy... time will tell, but my limited marketing skills will be tested!

Regarding my day job, I'm not enjoying it these days. I'm just bored and unstimulated and therefore thanks to my ADD constantly distracted with delusions of grand adventures and crazy ideas of ways to make money by other means that don't involve a clockwatched job working for a herd of obnoxious demeaning bosses for a heavily taxed meager salary that just gets less and less in relation to inflation and having to risk my life 10 times a week in traffic from hell to get to my dreary old office in this most hideous of industrial environments to perform the repetitive monotonous tasks of the job that hacks away constantly at the dwindling time that's been allocated to my existence in this bodily form on this earth. That and I don't want to live in the city anymore!

I'm so desperately hungry for change and some excitement and new challenges with decent potential rewards, both financial and mental well-being. I don't want to be stuck in this rut anymore, having to make that depressing infuriating journey through many of the planets worst fucktards to this boring job in this ugly place, while constantly being in a gradually deepening financial pit that makes any form of progress impossible! I've had enough being so poor that just being poor makes me even more poor, I've had enough of struggling to get from one payday to the next and going through the same monthly depression that gets deeper and deeper as the month progresses.

At the moment I've even lost my mojo for running, which scares me because I love the running and I love being addicted to running but right now that craving to run is just dulled.

The time is coming for big changes, and that time needs to be soon before this dreadful hole of expanding blackness consumes my soul beyond the point of return! Life as it is now, my life, cannot continue on the bumpy lonely thorn-bush lined downhill path it's going now.

In the next few days I need to think about a timeline of targets, including at which point my alternative incomes generate enough funds consistently to leave this soul-sucking day job to work for myself full time without risking losing my home!

There's more to life, more to me, than what I am now. This can't be how it ends for me!


Fuck that! Time to start climbing upwards...

But for now, my half-hour lunch break is over, back to the coalface...

Day 9

Ok I'm bullshitting just a little here, I had 2 beers with my dinner on Saturday evening but I'm not counting that as failure and restarting the daily count because it was well earned beer after a long tough hot day starting with an 8km run and a lot more walking all over Hermanus on a stinking hot day. It wasn't a pissup and I had no desire for any more so the count continues, this being day 9 since I last got drunk.

The dreaded weekend was actually very nice. Yes stressful because I was unable to contribute too much to the cost of it all, which I'm sure was quite a lot that The Wife covered, which didn't go unappreciated! There was no awkwardness and we had a great weekend away as a family in a town we would quite happily move to live in. Being there made us realise how unpleasant and stressful life is living in the city and dealing with the traffic and commute, crappy thankless jobs, crime and overcrowding, etc, let alone the expense. And people in the city are just generally shit. Hermanus is still a bustling town but it's a world away from life in the city! Much less stressful, and it's quieter, cleaner, people are friendlier, much less crime, it's safer to be outside of our residential fortresses (Tammy was riding her bicycle out in the actual street!) We were highly envious of the people living out there, they generally seemed happy. So we are going to look at ways to someday move out to a place like Hermanus and still earn a sustainable living. Certainly more of a practical option than moving to Australia!

All that being said we had a fantastic weekend. We stayed in the Mountain View Manor guest house. Our hosts Charlise and Geoff were fantastic, they made us feel totally at home and they made the best breakfasts I've tasted in years! The room was big and comfortable, and the location was great, it was centrally enough located to access wherever we wanted to go yet still in a quiet neighbourhood so as to be away from the hustle and bustle. It was close to the Sandbaai coastline, I went for two nice long runs along the coast. And we went into town to the country market which was lovely, only proper authentic crafts and organic foods, etc. No imported kuk. We walked around town and went for a drink (I had a grapetiser) down at Bientangs Cave in the old harbour, dinner at a little Portuguese restaurant near the beach close to the guest house, where I had my 2 beers. Sunday on the way home we took the day to stop at a few wine estates where The Wife did plenty of wine tasting. I had plenty of coffee, and ended up not being able to sleep last night until about midnight.

The weekend was a much needed stress release for all 3 of us. Tammy had an absolute ball all the way! This week I HAVE to up the effort with my running and get back into the gym again, starting tonight!

I've hit a nice break with my sauces - a friend from another life (we grew up in the same town, last saw each other about 30 years ago) has a printing business, he has printed off hundreds of labels for my first two sauces at no cost. It really is a big help because as soon as they arrive in Cape Town I can launch and start selling my stuff and generating an income. It's all I need to get going is labels! It really is a God-send which I'm most grateful for!

Have a nice day folks! (creek creek...)

Unreasonably Insane Craving

Yeah I know, 4th blog in a day, must be my record. It's 6.30pm and I'm at home and losing my fucking mind and as much as I know it's unreasonable it's unstoppable. Certain compounding triggers have angered me to boiling point and all I want to do is reach for the bottle and down a big hearty gulp of whiskey, I know that will calm my bad mood in an instant. That craving is mighty convincing and it's taking a lot of effort not to do it! But I've made almost a week now, I'm not going to break! Not yet!

I didn't feel like going for a run after all that build up earlier, we got back a bit late and I'm in a foul sad mood. I had my mind set on parking in front of the computer in peace and working on my stuff but it's been occupied again. Then I couldn't find the key to the side door at my desk, it was eventually found in a fucking box! WHY WHY WHY was it there! Why can people just not put things where they belong!!! This place is an absolute flipping dump, the mess just grows and grows and it's making me mad! Things being put in a different place all the time infuriates me, as a creature of habit. I won't bother to express in the necessary expletives what it does to my blood temperature when my personal stuff gets moved and messed with (like my bathroom scissors!)

I really really need a strong drink right now!

But I must admit this blog is probably like the AA sponsor whom an alcoholic would call as the crutch to bitch and rant on like I'm doing here to relieve the craving for a drink. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable whining and pitying myself speaking to some other person albeit having been through the same thing, well to anybody really. My "woe is me" moan as Wife has often referred. Maybe I should talk to a shrink, somebody who has to listen and be understanding and not have to be friends with afterwards, though I'm not sure that idea instills a lot of comfort either. No I like the blog, it doesn't talk back, argue or offer clinical advice. It just listens!

Wife found me lying on my bed in my room a while ago looking at my phone (starting a new blog post actually), I was hiding away from the noises and bickering and and my own frustrations and from the sheer boredom I go through when I'm home in the evening unable to access my stuff and not passing the time by getting shitfaced. The constant fighting between the three females in this house does my head in, another madness soothed by the sweet nectar of intoxication. She asked what's wrong and chirped some snotty comment again. She has no clue what's going on here. She has no interest so she has no idea what I'm doing or going through right now, though in fairness nor does anybody else. I have not mentioned any of this to anybody. It's better this way, I don't want sympathy or pity. This is my battle, I need to face it and fight it alone. Other people are not interested in the whimperings and pains of an alcoholic, even one trying to break free. Probably because they've heard it all before and have all long since lost interest, condemning us to a certain early death by the bottle, by our own irresponsible stupidity. To be honest, I am always aware that this addiction could kill me and I know the ways it can do so, particularly through liver damage, and despite my constant battles to lose weight and ferocious cardio exercising especially running I also know that a large part of my bulging "belly" is due to a swollen liver. Yet despite knowing all this the alcohol makes us alcoholics feel invincible. "If it hasn't got me by now then I'm probably ok". Yet being clear headed this deadly reality is a great fear which cause quiet despondency, but only until the next craving for the spirit takes over all logical reason and the manipulative spirits fog my mind back into the darkness of ignorance once more.

I'm getting tired of this now, tired of this battle with the booze, tired of my life revolving around the next drinking session and the resulting hangover, tired of missing out and messing up because of drinking. This is coming to the point where I know if I don't change my life drastically and drop this evil affliction in place of a healthier lifestyle very soon it's unlikely I'm going to get another chance. It is literally a case of do or die. And I'm not ready to die!

---------------------------------------------------

Anyway, I'm now having dinner. Home made fish cakes and spaghetti, and veggies which I asked for, I was craving some vegetables. I do feel better now.

One thing with me and drinking - food is always a deterrent to drink. When I'm drinking I seldom eat because food fills the stomach and takes away the desire to drink. That's why when we have a party I seldom eat until I'm too plastered to drink anymore, if at all. So the same tactic seems to work to quell the cravings now while trying not to drink too. This is a bad thing, for the same reasons smokers put on weight when quitting the fag; eating becomes a replacement for the bad habit. I've quit smoking twice (8 months smoke free now!) and never put on weight as a result because I've always picked up the running pace and consciously eaten healthy. Beating this beast, I fear, might not be so simple!

Giving up smoking was tough both times, but that was a piece of piss compared to this!

If I can keep this up and hold out, I know I'm in for one hell of a ride if my temper and mood swings today were any indication of how this goes! I feel bad for my family, though I do hope they could on some level be understanding. I don't expect help, I gave up on that hope ages ago, but some mild understanding would go a long way.

That said, if it weren't for you, dear diary, it would not be possible!

Goodnight!

Over it.

Ok I'm over that downer I had in my last blog. Not sure why I'm getting mood swings like that. Maybe I'm bipolar, or it could be alcohol withdrawals. Or it could be manopause.  It wasn't fake, rather just a bit over-dramatic in expression.

What I do need to is get the running shoes out and start running again. I've not run since Two Oceans, been taking a break while this stitched up wound on my arm heals. Tonight I'll go for a run when I get home and take Tammy with, she can ride her bicycle alongside me. She needs the exercise too. She is also getting a bit on the chubby side from all the crap she eats. I don't feed her said crap and I'm not there to give it to her (last night I came home and she was eating the processed chicken nuggets and a toasted cheese sandwich, no veggies of any kind). The sight of which (mountain of carbs) made me cringe but as I only get home at that stage and she's being fed by granny who is pretty much more parent to her than her own parents I don't really have a say when nobody takes my side. On Monday it was pizza for lunch and supper and again for lunch the next day. That really upsets me but if I mention it I get shat on. What I can do is help her get some exercise to burn off all the kuk she eats, then when we get back home I'll cook something healthy, if she hasn't already had a dinner of carbs.

See this is one of those frustrations of having a lack of resources and time to take control. If I'm not there to provide nor have the money to buy loads of healthy stuff then it becomes difficult to argue against the gang. I get into so much shit for speaking out that usually I rather just keep quiet and pour a drink.

So after the run and dinner I'm looking forward to spending some more time on my bottle label design, and doing some work on my website. And last night I downloaded the season finale for Walking Dead which I'm excited to see.

Oh, and I have to pack for this dreaded weekend away. While we're there I'll be motivating for some energetic and free outdoors activities like hiking in the mountains, walking on the beach, etc. to save a buck.

But first I have to deal with my absolute pet hate in life - sitting in the horrid traffic that makes up my hated travel home.

Oh the joys...

Downer

Just a quick bit of blog therapy as right now I'm down in the doldrums. Miserable! Mainly because of my usual cause for depression - money. The lack of it and the constant demand to keep on dishing it out causes immeasurable stress and anxiousness! There are purchases I need to make to get my sauces marketable, like labels and more bottles and ingredients to make more stock. Then there's this weekend away that I'm actually not looking forward to because of lack of money, which I know is going to cause problems and fights with the wife because money is often the cause of friction between us. I know she looks down on me because I'm poor. She makes more money than I do so she spends more than I do on necessities and bills and generally seems to have access to more. My cash availability is transparent, it's always the same, no secrets, yet the Wife's cash flow is a complete mystery to me, despite always having my head bitten off over money running out yet there's money for holidays, etc. The debt that she digs herself deeper into terrifies me because it drags us both down. I don't get deeper into debt, my debt remains at the same level, I just don't bring in enough cash to sustain my own expenses on a month to month basis, living from pay check to pay check, counting pennies after the 3rd of every month until the next salary hits my bank account only to all be taken away by debts ind interest withing days.

That is the point of this chili sauce exercise - not for fun - I want to try to build up a steady cash inflow on the side, hoping it will gradually increase to the point of building capital to expand to better infrastructure and other products and eventually have a professional production supplying retailers with awesome products. But none of that can happen if I can't even scrape together the basics to get the first batch on the market! But we're going on holiday!

Keeping my mouth shut!

It's these kinds of absolute frustrations that gets me so constantly depressed! On top of that I'm doing a day job that I don't like, eg today I'm doing the job of somebody else who actually reports to me, and I don't know the details of his job like I'm supposed to as the department head, mainly because my own menial work keeps me too busy to learn those ever changing details. It's frustrating and humiliating, and I don't like it. But I have to sit here and do this job for most of my waking hours to bring in that pittance of a salary at the end of the month in an effort to keep the bills paid and the debts from sinking deeper, leaving very little time or resources to work on building a better life. When you are constantly on the back foot trying to play catch-up it's impossible to get ahead and make progress. All I need is a break, a small lotto win or something to get ahead and get a small business going. But that's not how life works, especially as a white male in this country that doesn't have family money as a springboard to build on something worthwhile. This struggle is something I cannot clearly explain, especially having to also deal with alcoholism, ADD, etc.

Now I'm expressing in more detail than I normally do how I feel on a regular and often constant basis. It's times like this that I use as reason to drink, which only makes it worse but the thought of which usually excites me. Like "fuck the world and all it's crap, I'll just go home and drown my thoughts in that black fog again." And I look forward to that! Times like this that make an endeavor to not drink very very difficult to maintain. More often than not these days I feel like my life is pointless, it's an irreparable balls-up that's going nowhere but downwards into more misery and difficulty. I'm trying to put on a positive front, and really I am trying to see the good and the opportunities but they are just not happening, everything just seems out of reach and now I'm brutally aware that I'm moving into the older years of my life and in a few short years it will be time to retire and I will have NOTHING to take with me. I don't want to be alive for that! I don't want to be a wasted forgotten old alcoholic in some abusive government old-age home with not two cents to rub together, long forgotten by my family! These are the things that fill my mind these days. I'm afraid of what life holds. Afraid that all my ideas and ambitions will amount to nothing because of the financial hole my life has amounted to, and in the end I will never manage to catch up and be something my daughter can be proud of someday!

But that is the one thing that keeps me going, keeps my mind working to keep on trying - I have to do it for my Tammy! That kid is my heart and soul, she drives my world and somehow I have to make this all work out for the better, for her sake!

I know that if anybody heard me saying these things they'll laugh at me, because we live in a nice house and have a comfortable life. And yes, that's how it seems. But what's a nice house if you can't afford some paint to make it look nice or get the pool serviced or the leaking geyser repaired or even buy a new pair of underwear every now and then. Appearances are deceptive, because I have no spare money to work with once all the ridiculous bills and debt payments have been made every month! Nothing! And it's killing my soul!

Now I really feel the urge to drink stronger than any other time this week, because I'm crying inside, and drinking is all that makes that better. Tonight is going to be agony!

I've really had enough of being miserable and alone and struggling with my own weaknesses all the time!

Day 5

Getting bored of this yet?

So far this daily diary thing is working for me, taking the fight against alcohol a day at a time and keeping a written journal of the progress! I write this with the idea in mind that I have a captive audience out there following my story with encouragement and compassion, though I'm also not naive enough to believe that that audience is real, I doubt anybody else will ever read this. But in my mind it is real and it's helping me. If I lie or cheat I'm only lying or cheating myself, which is pointless and stupid, rendering this whole exercise a waste of my own time, so rest assured dear audience of binary numbers, this platform is me in all my honest entirety!

Last night I did feel like having a drink, as usual, but the urge wasn't as strong as usual. I didn't drink anything, that quarter bottle of J&B is still there, probably getting desperate for some attention, but I've ignored it. So 5 days sober now. I'm not going to be fooled into thinking the addiction is waning this quickly without a drink, I know it doesn't work this way, it waits for you to relax and then pounces unsuspectingly usually in the form of landing in a situation where having a drink is obliged, waking the monster and fueling it back into taking control again.

I have to not let that happen.

Besides, last night I had to go out late to fetch The Wife from a work party in the city at 10pm, so drinking was not even an option. That sort of situation tends to block out most urges anyway. So I used the quiet time while I had access to my computer to get a load of work done on my chili business, and chat to my sweet daughter about her day and stuff. That kid loves telling me all kinds of crazy stories and the scenarios in her head because I listen and I enjoy listening to her. She's so awesome, and she listens to what I have to say with genuine interest and without judgement or insult. It's a rare treat!

Prelim design for my bottle label

I finally got round to creating some financial and product costing spreadsheets and set up the costs per bottle of the two sauces I've made so far and worked out what my selling prices will be. I've also designed a (preliminary) bottle label for my flagship sauce, Pirate Sauce. I'm still deciding on the design details and will spend time in the coming days playing around with ideas, but at least the basic layout is there with the info section looking respectable. I sent it to a friend who's a graphic designer and offered to help and advise for a couple of bottles of sauce. Maybe he can spruce it up a bit.

This coming weekend is going to be a personal challenge as we're going away to Hermanus. The Wife has booked one of these Groupon getaway specials. We will no doubt be going to a few bars and restaurants. I'm going to challenge myself to not have a single alcoholic beverage. Apart from the obvious reasons I also cannot afford it. (I don't think Wife is even aware of what's going on in my life regarding the drinking, I haven't mentioned it). Depressingly I don't actually have any money for this trip, it's a bit of an unpleasant and awkward situation to be landed in this position where I'm going to have to find money that I don't have for food, petrol, entertainment, etc and still have enough to get to the next paycheck in three weeks and still buy my sauce bottle labels next week when my designs are finalized. So not drinking alcohol will save a load of cash!

This crap chair in my office is so annoying. The wheels on two of the castors keeps popping off, lobsiding my chair and rendering it unmovable. It's irritating, but I won't even ask for a new one, I know that conversation won't end in my favour! But more annoying this morning was walking into my office to the stench of death. I knew exactly why, we've had a mouse problem for a while, last week a company came in to lay poison traps. I haven't seen the usual mouse shit scattered on my desk for the last few mornings so I expected to start smelling it's rotten corpse soon. After an extensive search I found it in the file drawer at my colleagues desk in a nest it had made by shredding his payslips, covered in mouse shit and what looked like bloody piss. Disgusting sight, even worse stench. This colleague is the one who's in Uganda training shopfitters now. He's got some cleaning to do when he returns.

I'm so insanely busy at work this week with that plonker on his holiday in Uganda, it's too much, but I'm not pulling unpaid overtime, I don't get paid nearly enough for that nonsense and I have too much other stuff to do in my private time to even consider it, so I best stop blogging and get back to work.

Catch y'all tomorrow... all none of you! haha

Day 4

Quick update, so incredibly busy at work today. My colleague who does most of the local bills of quantities has gone to train a new team of shopfitters in Uganda for two weeks and he's not up to date with his work, leaving me to do his job and my own, both of which a full time busy jobs. So I am actually crapping under the workload. As an experienced shopfitter he knows the BoQ's in much greater detail than I do so it takes me a lot longer to put together a list of all the fittings and fixtures required to build a large Pep store, of which I have 3 which need to be done today, along with other management issues that I need to deal with, such as getting a truck released at the Lesotho border being held there by corrupt border officials demanding payment of a lot of money because the "tax invoice looks fake", same tax invoice format I always send with these cross border shipments. It is in effect some dirty bastard expecting a bribe to be paid, which we will not do, we will rather spend the R5000 it's costing us to same-day courier a more "authentic" stamped and signed letterheaded invoice to these dickheads rather than pay the prick his R200 or whatever he'll accept! Africa really is a god-damned continent run by dishonest useless idiots! As I've said before I would still ditch this dusty shithole for greener more civilised pastures like North America or Europe with my family at the slightest hint of an opportunity! Without a second thought!

The answer you're wondering is no, I did not make it to the AA meeting last night. I got cold feet and clung to the excuse that I was told by Wife that I have to make dinner while she completes a study assignment. I'm still well nervous about making the move of going, it's still a secret (between me and my unread blog! LOL). Maybe next week my balls will have swollen a bit with some confidence.

And no, I did not drink last night. Despite that evil quarter bottle of whiskey left over from last Friday, taunting and jeering at me each time I go into the scullery. I know it would be better to kill temptation by throwing it out, but I can't bring myself to doing that seemingly simple thing. Laugh all you want at my weakness, dear internet, but you do not understand the struggle!

This is all the boring waffle I have time for today...

Day 3

So far so good, still no booze in the last 3 days. Early days still, I know, but progress is progress, albeit in baby steps.

Last night we went out to a restaurant for dinner, Enchanted Pizza in Parklands. The pizza was fantastic, and I drank sparkling mineral water. Quite enjoyed it actually.

Though I'm was still considering the dilemma of social functions like the usual rugby braai or going to a pub. What then? If I keep it to one or two "social" drinks am I still going to count those days, providing I manage to keep control so it doesn't become a binge, ie. hammering back shooters then hitting the whiskey back at home just to get pissed.

The problem is I understand that alcoholism doesn't work like that. It's all or nothing. I know from many years of experience that once I start my inhibitions and all good intentions frizzle away with each swig and the demonic urge to consume as much alcohol as possible until all sense of reason and reality is a mindless blur (and slur) takes full control without much effort. "Just one beer" soon becomes a "fuckit, I'll start again tomorrow", and then tomorrow is another pity-party full of regrets and kicking myself for being a weak idiot again with a throbbing hangover rendering another day wasted!

One option is to allow unrestricted "off days", like once every fortnight. But then that sounds just like the cop-out that it is! That feels like the insecurity of FOMO (fear of missing out) and a fear of not having fun griping my thoughts. This addiction is like a parasite on my mind! Not like, it is!

We'll see what happens. For now I'm taking this one day at a time. Each day sober is a small victory!

Tonight being Tuesday is AA meeting in my area, a fact that I'm brutally conscious of. I'm still in half minds about going, each thought of going gives me nervous butterflies bordering on fear. I've not mentioned it to my family or anybody yet because if I say I'm going then chicken out then nobody takes me seriously. Understandably, since I've said these things so many times before!

Besides this blog I've not mentioned this "mission" to anybody.

I shall report back tomorrow what happens...

Mission - Day 2

So this weekend I've spent a bit of time thinking about my ongoing battle with the bottle. On Friday night again I got shitfaced at home, polishing off most of a bottle of whiskey, which as usual rendered me useless with a hangover for most of Saturday. An all too common recurring story in my life!

For anybody following my blog you'll have noticed lately I'm going through one of my more vigorous phases of desperately wanting to give up the booze, mostly because lately I've been drinking particularly more. Albeit these revelations to quit are mostly more bark and no bite, nothing ever changes, I'm thinking this time it's time to actually put some action into the happening instead of just bitching about it on here on the Daily Drumroll and by this afternoon losing all my resolve and getting wasted again tonight after work and again every other evening for the rest of the week.

I've truly had enough of that self destruction now! (Again!)

I'm still considering joining the AA meetings again on Tuesday evenings, maybe in some way that will help, if nothing else to change my reaction to the usual triggers that get my easily manipulated sub-conscience convinced to drink another session (boredom at home, frustration, angry & bitchy wife, anger and hatred at myself and my own inadequacies, etc), though thinking about it in the car this morning while wife went on again for an hour about other people who I don't know and their life's problems while bottling in all I wish I could say, I was thinking that maybe going to speak to a professional, a shrink of some sort, might not be a bad idea. It might provide some insight from a different perspective and may go towards changing my own stubborn mentality. I don't know. I don't know if that would help, and I certainly can't afford that sort of expense right now so like so many other grand ideas that I come up with it will likely just hit the dead end wall of financial restrictions, and fade away into the depths of the pages of this blog.

Maybe somebody at the AA can provide an alternative to professional therapy! Or maybe after a session or two at the AA like last time I'll scrap that idea due to being just an invisible outsider once more, or it will be like a church & prayer service. I'll rather go to church on a Sunday for religious inspiration than an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Or am I being stubborn and selfish in branding them as useless to me before giving them a chance, based on one insecure experience?

Anyway, the point of all this is that sometime soon this pity-party of constantly feeling sorry for myself because of alcohol needs to come to an end and soon so that I can prolong what's left of my time in the world with some form of pride and dignity. That will not happen as long as the booze still has a grip on my body and mind. Nobody else cares enough to help or advise (there's that self-pity thing again) so I'm going to try do this alone. And if it works, maybe I'll document my methods and use it to inspire others in the same predicament. Alcoholism is a terribly lonely dark hole to be in, one which the rest of society (including loved ones) tends to walk around and look the other way, with only insult, condemnation, and hypocritical judgement on offer.

It's like the one rule of the AA - you only need a desire to quit drinking. I have that desire in bucketloads, but the strength and willpower to meet that desire is seriously lacking. I don't know why it's such a difficult thing to overcome and just not allow myself to walk into that bottle store in the first place, let along pour that first precious drink!

I'm waffling again and need to get back to doing my job. So here's what I'm going to do as an attempt at self motivation to not drink...

I'm going to use this blog as a daily diary about giving up drinking, counting and documenting each day off the booze.

I'm marking this as day two, being Monday now. I didn't drink yesterday or Saturday, though Saturday doesn't count because I was so hungover from Friday. So this is now day two of hopefully a new life of sobriety.

No this is not a permanent commitment to never touching alcohol again, there will be exceptions. The concept of never touching a drink again is absolutely frightening, and overwhelming. The concept is, to my mind, unfathomable Example my 40th is coming up soon and I've booked a Mexican cantina for the party, so there will no doubt be a lot of tequila. Tequila is one of my weaknesses, I won't be able to say no to that.

Besides, this might only last a few days until my mad brain moves onto some other fantastical idea. But for now the idea is fresh and strong and as I write this I have all intention of seeing it through.

So let's see what happens, and we'll talk again tomorrow...

Note: This will be an honest daily account. If I drink I will say so, and tomorrow start from Day 1 again, maybe the private humiliation will be adeterrant.