The Devil's Workshop

“Once you've taken a few punches and realize you're not made of glass, you don't feel alive unless you're pushing yourself as far as you can go.” Matt Buckner in Green Street Hooligans.

List of things to do: (roughly dated 08/25/08)

1. No more late night fist fights – Check.
2. No more waking up to a vomited covered bed – Check.
3. Shorten list of people to apologize to on Saturday and Sunday mornings – Check.
4. Stop sleeping with stupid women I don’t care about – Check.
5. Eliminate the blindingly drunk driving – Check.
6. Eliminate the bar tabs in excess of $30 – Check.
7. No more waking up still drunk before work – Check.
8. Cut down on drunken late night phone calls – Check.
9. Quit making a belligerent fool out of myself – Check.
10. No more visits to The Party Source after 11pm – Check.

So it has been a few successful months of behaving like a reasonable and (halfway) responsible adult, I’d say I’m doing a good job. I have to admit that waking up and not feeling as though I drank a bottle of Clorox bleach the night before is quite nicer than the opposite. My checking account is thanking me, my friends are thanking me and believe me my body is thanking me. So all in all I’m on the right track…right?

Well, I am not so convinced.

Yes of course there are numerous benefits to my lack of late night bar time shenanigans but for all those benefits there is one new problem I have created. A few months ago if you put a few bourbons in my system you would see possibly the most insane human being on earth. My memory of a normal evening would end at about 11pm, which normally left me the task of reconstructing my whereabouts via credit card statement and text message records. Now after a few weeks of serious loss of control I learned from my mistakes by deleting my texts before bed and leaving my credit card at home so I had no way to remember my misadventures. Honestly I didn’t want to remember them.

Towards the beginning of fall things were in a serious downward spiral. I woke up to puke covering my face, chest, pillow and sheets more than once and drank so much bourbon that on one occasion I pissed the bed. I was driving at over 100mph on the freeway with a blood alcohol content high enough to knock down an offensive lineman in the NFL. I was punching more inanimate objects and close friends than a pro boxer on training day. I routinely heard stories from people I barely knew about a maniac they heard about last night named “Cheese” and my friends were telling me I needed help. I had a death wish and was more than happy to demonstrate it.

So, what the hell am I complaining about?

I’m fucking BORED!

There is something to be said for the constant chaos that I created for myself over the past few months, it kept me on my toes. Normal nights at 12:30 I would be midway through a massive bar tab, now I’m midway through a public TV infomercial. Normal mornings I might wake up on my floor in a puddle of drool, now it lands on my pillow. Normally I would be called a maniac now you could call me tame. I guess this is abnormal for me. I don’t know how to live without chaos, drama, fighting, blood, tears and everything that makes a maniac feel alive.

I have taken more than my fare share of punches and have known for a long time I am not made of glass. In fact, if you think about the number of times I have escaped from death or danger, you could say I was made of stone. I am fucking invincible. I’ve been shot at, hanging by my neck, in near fatal car wrecks and in fights that almost killed me, yet here I sit writing away. I need the presence of danger to feel alive. I need the knife to my throat and the gun to my head before I will be fully convinced I am still breathing.

Ok now this is really the lack of sex talking here.

So yeah, I replaced the excitement I got from my psycho ex Meg when we broke up with even heavier drinking and partying. Oh and please believe me that my little New Yorker does the same, its just she isn’t here. If she was, this wouldn’t be a problem because as I discovered during my visit to see her, my cock remains perpetually hard in her presence (it actually kind of hurts after a while). But since I am left alone here in this mess of a city, I sit here and think about all the fun I’m missing on those long weekend nights.

Well I guess that’s that, I’m bored and there is nothing I can do about it. I mean it really isn’t all that bad, my season on NHL 08 is getting a ton of attention and my apartment has never been cleaner. Instead of hearing stories about me on the previous night, I am hearing them about others. Instead of apologizing profusely to friends in the morning, I have them calling me to apologize. Instead of waking up to texts from her saying that I am an ass, I wake up to them saying “I love you.” So yeah, I am not necessarily complaining, I like this thing I have going here. I just have to be plain old honest and say, it gets a little boring from time to time.

Just keep in mind that, “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”