Yesterday was Day 41 of my year of living sober.
Merry Christmas Tree at Melbourne's Joy FM
It was a Wednesday. Being self-employed/freelance I write pretty much everyday and take each day—and opportunity—as it comes. Yesterday turned out to be one of my busiest days in ages and involved a range of ‘business’ activities from website maintenance and upgrading to a radio interview on Melbourne’s Joy FM.
Doing a transfer from wordpress hosted to self-hosted blogging almost did my head in, but eventually I got there. There’s still a lot to learn but I’ll take each plug-in at a time and try and remain patient with my technological limitations (of which there are many).
Having been an actor in a former life, I still get the odd call from a casting agent seeing if I’d like to come in for a Television commercial audition. With one sixteen-month-old baby girl and another Mitchell offspring due any day now I definitely DID want to come in yesterday for an interview with the lovely casting girls at Chameleon Casting for a potato crisp (we used to call them chips in Oz) commercial which would pay more than I earn by selling approximately 1000 copies of my debut novel (which came out in April in Australia this year).
Then, after driving across town for the audition, I headed into the city to try and find a parking space close to Joy FM headquarters. After doing a few laps of the CBD I opted for a safe all day park (to avoid any damn parking fine) which required me to walk a bit further than I’d planned but gave me peace of mind that apart from a cheap won-ton soup in Little China Town, petrol would be my only expense for the day.
The point of this journal-like entry is by the time I got home I was bushed (as an old fogie might say). Being bushed—both mentally and physically—I would have loved a drink. Jeez, I would have killed for a drink! I really wanted a beer, then another, then some wine.
But I didn’t. Despite my mental craving I wasn’t really tempted to throw in the YOLS towel. I just had to frown and bare it, realizing yesterday that the hours between 5pm and 7pm are turning out to be the ‘danger’ period for me. This was when I used to turn to the bottle to ‘turn-off’ from my day’s work. Now I turn to ice-cream or, as I did last night, some left-over mud cake.
Sure, it’s not ideal to replace booze with sugar but at least I’m trying something different. Even if it is just alternating Peppermint with Rocky Road and throwing in the odd Cheesecake Shop special.
My name is Ben and I’m a social experiment.
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Little Booze Joke 41:
How many workaholics does it take to change a lightbulb?
One. He can do everything.
PS. Check out Day 10 for a post about fellow workaholics Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump
