my way

Pssssssssst. I turn the cap on the bottle of Miller High Life. I absentmindedly toss it into the garbage can.

“Damn, that’s one less for the lamp,” I think to myself, then shrug it off as completely unimportant. I’ve been stashing bottle caps for years now. Dating back to my days in Arizona. Geez, that’s been 15 years now. There are Red Dog bottle caps in there from that time.

I was lonely then. I’m lonely now.

I don’t take a swig from the bottle. Instead, I place it on the table. I start futzing around on the internet. I place the movie “Alien” in my DVD player and push play. I don’t like the silence this place has about it. And I’m tired of listening to music for the moment.

Twenty minutes later, the beer still sits there, untouched. I think about it for the first time. I don’t drink as much anymore. Drinking has been a constant companion of mine since I was 15 years old. A few times, it’s been my only companion, and very easily could be that way now. But, it isn’t right now. I do still love to get a good drunk on. To tie one on. To get shit-faced. Or maybe even just keep a buzz, but certainly not an inferior one.

Just a few days ago I was hanging with some friends and got good and toasty. Not drunk, just nicely buzzed.

Now, here I sit, with a beer and I’m not drinking. It’s been happening a lot lately. I open one up. Maybe drink it, maybe not. It’s almost like it is just a habit now. Something I’m used to doing, so I do it. Not because I want to, but because I’m used to doing it.

Replacing much of the idle time that used to be spend guzzling awful amounts of alcohol has been writing. The only problem is, the writer thinks the writing is crap. Which, I guess all writers think, even the good ones, and that’s what keeps them writing. I just know that my writing has mostly been worthless pap. Generated to keep me from going insane. It’s the way I’ve always worked my way through my tormented existence. Writing the things that I never can say.

I wrote in my early 20s, some would call those the “productive years.” I wouldn’t. I tried to dabble in screen play writing, just like every so-called, wanna-be writer does. I had a story about a cat. It was pretty good. I wrote about a gang (bad word) or group of 20-somethings who were all in debt for different reasons -- all as dumb as the other -- and they decided to rob a gangster of his money. It was bad. A good idea, I thought, and maybe even more relevant now, so if you steal the idea you will pay, but I just didn’t like it.

Those writings got tossed in an early purge. I just felt it necessary to rid myself of those writings when I actually started writing for a living at the student paper. Oh, heady times.

I didn’t write much for the next three years. Relationships seem to do that to me. But then it ended. And the writing started again.

It stopped again soon after. Once again, in a relationship.

Then it started again. While in a relationship. I dug that writing. It was fun. It had no meaning. Then the relationship ended. The writing continued. And got dark.

Then it stopped once again. Why? You guessed it. A relationship. That one tried to force me to write when I didn’t. And that was probably the best thing she did for me. She wanted me to write. Problem was, she only wanted me to write about her. And that wasn’t easy. It just didn’t flow.

Until she dumped me.

Then I wrote about her. And others.

And then I purged again. Because of her.

Dumb. I try not to have regrets. But as Paul Anka wrote, Frank Sinatra popularized and Sid Vicious put it in my head … “Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention…”

But yeah, that’s one of them. I should make a list of regrets one day. I’d probably be surprised at how many of them there actually are. And how stupid I am for feeling that way about anything in my past. It’s me. I’m a bag full of mistakes and bad choices. Along the way, I made a couple of right ones, but then fucked it up. And usually not in a good way. But, I have been lucky to find a few who knew how to fuck things up the right way…sigh.

But anyway…

So, now I’m back to forcing myself to write. I like it. It’s better than waking up feeling shitty and having the shits.