The voices...the voices

So I took a vacation from drinking. I'm trying to work out more and I need to lose some weight, and the drinking was proving to be counter productive to both of those endeavors. So until I get down to fighting weight, I've decided to lay off the sauce.

Its been about a month.

First two weeks were no problem. I was motivated, I was focused, frankly I was probably still fairly pickled.

Third week, mostly out of habit, I could have used a beer. But all in all it wasn't that tough to abstain, especially as I was feeling better and I was starting to see some weight come off.

The fourth week has brought about some unexpected consequences. I've come to remember one of the reasons that I drink in the first place....the voices.

Well they're less voice and more random thoughts. Hmmm, maybe I can explain it this way. Have you ever (over)loaded the back of a van for a long trip ? You get everything in there and then quick-shut the door. Well that's what drinking has done for me. To stay with the analogy, have you ever gotten to the end of your trip and lifted the read hatch only to have all the shit that you crammed back come pouring out onto the driveway in a giant avalanche of diaper bags, luggage, and holiday deserts ? That's what stopping drinking has done for me.

So,years and and years of random disassociated thoughts that have been well crammed behind a sturdy wall of scotch have suddenly decided to pour out all over my mental driveway. That in and of itself would be tolerable, but the resultant increase in my daily mental faculties due to a lack of a steady running hangover has also provided me substantially extra RAM to create an entirely new batch of disassociated thoughts that are sometimes funny, often scary, and ultimately exhausting.

Stuff like:

- wondering if child molesters covertly use midget porn as a legal, if somewhat unsatisfying alternative, and if so how that revelation might be used for the benefit of mankind.
- thinking about using farting as an effective anti-tobacco political statement. As in, would farting in the face of a smoker provide them some perspective on the situation ? Then wondering about the unintended, but potentially entertaining, consequences of uniting flatulence and flame.
- revisiting the idea of putting the shortstop between the pitcher and the catcher to obscure the vision of the batter and wondering how many games you could do it before the commissioner would convene a special meeting of the rules committee.
- Trying to come up with 5 common, yet funny, scenarios where I could use the phrases " It's no..." and " It's not..." in ways that it sounds like " Its snow..." and "Its snot.." and getting stuck at 1....OK, at 0.

And that's just a sample of stuff from like this morning...between alarm clock snoozes.

Anyway, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps, at least in my case, that the drinking might be the safer alternative.