If there is a place on earth for which I hold more disdain than Las Vegas, I have yet to see it. In truth, Vegas was never my place even when I was a drinker. Sure, I had some wild times here, and even a few that might be considered fun, but on the whole it’s loud and obnoxious and the main point in Vegas is debauchery. And still, I come to Vegas at least twice a year for my job. Believe me, it’s not by choice. It’s hard to be a sober guy in Sin City. ...
It’s August. That’s part of it. I’m approaching four years of sobriety and I can feel the squirrels prancing around in my brain. I didn’t recognize it at first. I knew that something was off, but it didn’t occur to me that this “offness” could be rooted in the fact that I’m nearing in on 1460 days without a drink. Actually 1461 because of leap year, but who’s counting? ...
It’s been a rough 2019. We’ve been through a lot as a family this year My wife and I had to appear in court on behalf of our son this week. We both gave statements in a case that resulted from the traumatic events we experienced in March. It was a hard day. Emotions ranged from anger to rage, to frustration, to compassion, to forgiveness. I suffered a migraine on the day of the court hearing. ...
A few months ago I was at a fixed menu dinner for work and I had glanced at the menu not really thinking about booze and agreed that it was fine for me — indeed it looked like a great meal with a number of delectable items that I’d surely enjoy. Everything was perfect until I put a spoonful of the vanilla ice cream that accompanied the pecan pie in my mouth. It was made with bourbon. ...
If you follow me on twitter on Instagram then you know I’ve transformed myself from a relatively sedentary guy to a relatively passionate runner. In a little over a year, I’ve gone from barely being able to run for 90 seconds to running between 10 and 15 miles per week. Running has become a form of self care for me and I love it. I’m grateful that my body continues to heal from the damage I did when I was drinking. ...
On a number of occasions I’ve been asked by friends about how to determine whether or not they have a drinking problem. Many of them have expressed concern about the label, “alcoholic,” with good reason. It carries a stigma. It conjures up images of unshaven men in ill fitting clothes drinking from a paper bag in a back alley. It is a label of the problem not of a solution. ...
At the end of 2018 I was thinking of combining this blog with an older one and renaming it. I was considering the change because I wasn’t sure that the idea of a sober blog, a sober persona online, was serving me. I’ve long struggled with the idea of identity. And so I’d shut down one twitter handle and renamed my primary handle. ...
A few weeks ago I changed my username on Twitter. It had been a long time coming. When I got sober and started interacting with people on Twitter I felt that I needed an anonymous handle and in the fog of the time I simply changed my handle from @ddeville to @soberboots to go along with the name of this blog. Shortly thereafter I felt that I needed to separate my other interests into a second handle and thus began the struggle of trying to maintain two handles on Twitter. Invariably, I neglected one of them. I spent time trying to get the followers that I’d had on @ddeville to migrate to my non sobriety handle, that didn’t work so well. I spent tome trying to only post certain things on one of the two handles and invariably ended up posting something about sobriety on the wrong handle. ...
I have been reluctant to write. For months, I’ve felt I have little left to be said. I’ve struggled to post a single thought in a month. The truth is that the Promises have come true in my life — not always in the way I might have expected them to, or even hoped they would, but they have come true. I wear life like a loose garment most of the time today. ...
My story is pretty unspectacular. The abbreviated version is that I began drinking heavily in response to some unresolved trauma from my childhood triggered by the birth of my son. I subconsciously knew this at the time of my drinking and after getting sober I know this to be true to fact. I hadn’t always been a heavy drinker, there were times when I’d binged, but by my early thirties, I was pretty mellow. ...
Feelings can be so intense. This morning I was supposed to take my son fishing on a charter out of Menemsha harbor. I woke at 6:30, made coffee, prepared lunch and snacks, and got him up for the adventure. We walked down to the appointed meeting point, the Menemsha Texaco, arriving at 7:50. Plenty of time to grab an extra snack and a T shirt for the boy who was wearing a sweatshirt with nothing underneath in August. Plenty of time to catch the boat. ...
What a difference time makes! Two years ago, I sat on this same ferry and typed out a post about the ferry that wasn’t a ferry and how much I’d wanted to drink that day. While that trip turned out amazing, and I didn’t drink despite that misadventure, it wasn’t an easy time. So much has changed for the better in the last two years. ...
I thought I’d laid my angst with the God talk to rest when I had my breakthrough last winter and came to understand that my challenge was with the God of my childhood rather than with the God of my understanding. I thought I’d finally gotten to the point that I could hear others talk about how God was doing things in their lives that they couldn’t do for themselves without having a visceral reaction. I thought that I’d made progress. And then I went to a Step meeting on a Friday. ...
I’m in grave danger of writing a post that’s just a bitch fest. I’ve had a hard week and I want to bitch and moan about it. I’ll just say that both Mrs. TKD and I have been very sick for about a week and it’s been a struggle to get well, hold the house together, get the boy to school, and get out Day jobs done. It’s hard when one of us gets sick, but when we’re both laid out it’s even worse. It can feel like everything is falling apart. ...
“I only run if someone is chasing me, like you know, the cops.” I’ve said that thousands of times, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. Usually, I said it either when someone suggested that I go for a run with them, or when they were bragging about their latest extraordinary run. Fitting that I’d move to a running town, made famous by some fool who runs in all sorts of weather wearing nothing but a Speedo. One of the few successful shops on Main Street in Annapolis is a running store. It’s been there as long as I can remember. You can’t take a drive for more than 30 minutes without seeing at least 25 of those obnoxious 26.2 euro style stickers on cars. I’ve always enjoyed seeing the occasional 0.0 sticker, thinking to myself “I’m not the only one who doesn’t run.” ...