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In 2012 I kept a journal on a deck of playing cards. I went from Bolivia to Adelaide, and then left on my own on a bus to Melbourne to be a comedian. I fell in love and screwed it up several times, and made more bad decisions than I care to remember, which is a bummer, because I've forced myself to. That's what this is.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Introduction - The Pitch
For my New Year's Resolution at the start of 2012 I decided to give up drinking.
I quickly revised the goal to a more realistic, “I'll try not to drink as much,” finally arriving on the target of one drinking day a week for the year. I set rules for myself: If I had one drink, that would count as a day. If I had a million drinks, that would also count as a day. I defined a 'day' as the hours from midday to midday on consecutive days – I did it like this, rather than making it midnight to midnight, so that I could stay out all night drinking and not have to use up two days when “realistically,” I rationalised, “if I drink from 7pm until 5am, that's only 10 hours, so it shouldn't have to count as two days.”
Genius.
I also loosened the rules on when I could use the days. There are 52 weeks in a year, so rather than just straight up give myself one a week, I decided that I could 'save up' days by taking weeks-long spells of complete sobriety, and then 'cashing in' those accumulated days in one glorious bender. It was all very civilised.
The most important part though, and probably the only reason I ended up going through with the whole thing until the end, was that an American girl named Caitlin gave me a deck of 52 playing cards upon hearing of my wager with myself. She told me that I should pick a card out every time I used a drinking day, and write what I did that day on the card as a way of keeping track of how many days I'd used up. This deck of cards became my diary of that year, lived as it was through alcohol, because as we all well know of the addict – whether through shameful indulgence, or white-knuckled abstinence – their life revolves around their vice.
I did actually finish the challenge (spoiler, soz), and I still have the deck of cards, complete with all the stories that I wrote on them. As it happened, 2012 was a pretty big year for me: I started in Bolivia, moved back with my parents in Adelaide, and then left on my own on a bus to Melbourne to be a comedian. I fell in love and fucked it up several times, and did more stupid shit than I care to remember.
When I had the idea to read over these cards and write a little something for each of them, I fancied it might be a fun little exercise in nostalgia. A lot of the major events of that year are things that I still think about from time to time, stories that I tell in bars, or at parties. They feel very close at hand, and because of that I felt like I wouldn't be writing about anything I hadn't already come to terms with. The thing about forgetting stuff though, is that you don't realise you've forgotten it – there's no empty space in the brain staring back at you, telling you something ought to be there.
What I'm trying to say is that when I started this, I wasn't aware of just how many awful things I'd done in 2012 that I was committing to writing about. Turns out there are a lot.
So think of this introduction here as a sort of disclaimer. This is me, trying to take the only chance I have to try and explain away a lot of the shit you are about to read as youthful... let's call it 'silliness'. That sounds fun, right? It's just silliness.
I really am sorry if anything you read here bums you out at all. I promise I didn't kill anyone, or do anything properly awful that I haven't already paid for (emotionally I mean, financially I have paid for nothing. You can't get blood from a stone.), but it was very difficult to write some of these chapters. For the sake of honesty I've kept everything in. I wanted to confront who I was head-on, because what's the use in trying to hide from the past? To pretend these things didn't happen – that's never going to help anyone. So here it is.
Here we go.
I'm starting right... nooooow.. NOW!
Now.
Peace, Taco.
Click here to read the next part - Day 1 - January 19th
This sounds like a bunch of damn dirty Commie gobbledigook but I'll give it a whirl I suppose.
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