Yes, my posting has tapered off to being virtually nonexistent around here. Truth of the matter is, there isn’t really much going on worth mentioning. As one or two of you may know, I gave up the hooch close to two years ago. I don’t like to go into that too much on this page, as listening to a retired hooch-head carry on and on and on about not being a hooch-head anymore is lame. But, lame-yet-happy is a natural byproduct of giving up a desperate-but-entertaining-yet-miserable lifestyle. Don’t listen to any of the nay sayers, from an external standpoint, a life with no alcohol is, in fact, boring as hell. One of my biggest fears before I gave it up was that I would become dull. Well, truth be told, I was right. I have become dull... amazingly dull. The only thing is, surprisingly, dull isn’t half bad when you’re happy all the time - as opposed to always having an amusing grab-bag of antecdotes detailing your miserable self-destructive behavior.

Yay me. Whatever. Even though I’m happy, I can assure you, my stories now suck worse than n/a beer.

Allow me to illustrate with this list the depths of my current state of boringness:

• Neatness. I now live in perpetual state of neat. I drink from a glass, I wash the glass. I change clothes, I place dirty clothes in a hamper. I wake up, I make bed. It is all very bizarre. When I walk into the house, I hang my coat in the closet, and (I’m not kidding you) put on slippers. All that is missing is the Mr. Rogers soundtrack, a sweater and a trolley that travels through the wall into the land of Make-Believe (comparatively, Mr. Rogers’ social life rocked. He got to go on tours of candy factories all the time). I used to live in a pile of filth that was two layers of empty beer bottles and three layers of dirty underwear thick. I have no idea what happened.
• In addition to neatness, I also live in a perpetual state of clean. Once a week I clean the neat apartment from ceiling to floor. Dust everything, then vacuum everything, then polish all the wood, then polish all the glass surfaces, then mop all the floors. As the apartment is already perfectly neat, and as I don’t wear shoes in the house and clean up after myself constantly, this takes no time at all. I know this because I race myself... for fun... I know. Bathroom: under a half hour. Kitchen: under a half hour. The entire rest of the apartment: down to (I’m not kidding you with the specific number) 66 minutes. I know, when you clean an entire apartment, some things always get missed. That is why, every day, I will try to devote to one small cleaning project. One day, take apart and clean the fans. Another day, remove everything from the cupboards and clean them. Another day, clean the windows, or scrub the window sills, or the radiators, or move the furniture and scrub the floor boards, and so on and so on.... Before, and I’m not proud of this, there were times I could smell my apartment before I walked in. Cigarettes, stale beer, dust mold, dirty cat litter, overfilled trash cans... the odor of CHAMPIONS. Okay, I’m a little proud of that. Now, I don’t have so much as a single stray cat hair... seriously. Think Hannibal Lechter’s looney cell but with nicer furniture. Yes, THAT clean. Creepy clean.
• Clothes. Pretty much the same as above. Back in the day, I’d just sniff the dirty clothes to make sure they didn’t smell too much like smoke (always), scotch sweat (often)... or sex (rarely). Nowadays, I like to do all the laundry on Saturday night between 12 and 2 a.m., because then the machines in the laundry room are always free. That, sadly I suppose, speaks volumes in and of itself. No more scotch sweat, of course. And sex? Ha!
• I have a new toy. It is sleek, powerful, high-tech and beautiful. I play with it every day. It is a vacuum cleaner.
• My former daily liquid consumption schedule: Noon until 11 p.m. - 2 pots of coffee. 11 p.m. - one beer for primer. 11:15 -scotch O’clock - one scotch, served with beer chaser. 11:30 - to 2 a.m. - four to six more scotches and one to two more beer chasers. 2 a.m. - a six pack for the road, so I could have one more before bed - which always turned into 5 beers before bed. Last beer would spill into my lap as I fell asleep on the couch. Wake up at noon - sometimes on the couch, sometimes in the bed, sometimes on the floor in between - repeat.

  Incidentally, amazingly, 2 things that I NEVER ONCE did: pissed myself or experienced a blackout. How? I have no idea. Actually, that isn’t completely true. I never pissed myself, but I would blackout if I mixed the pot and alchohol... but I never really had much of a taste for pot, so this was typically not much of an issue.

  My present daily liquid consumption schedule: morning (actual a.m. morning) - pot of coffee. At noon, I switch to teas (green, darjeeling, earl grey, chai - I like to mix it up for excitement), water, various tomato juices, orange juices, and apple ciders... I have them all. 8 p.m. to whenever - sometimes decaffeinated ceylon, sometimes decaffeinated earl grey, sometimes a spiced chai with cream and sugar (but only with the spiced chai) Why all the different teas? Because I’m a fucking rock star, that’s why. I’m a God damned wild man when it comes to varietal teas. But never herbal tea. Herbal tea is, like, totally for fags - not for tea drinking bad asses such as myself.

• Bedtime. Pajamas, in a freshly turned over bed. I like to bring my laptop to bed with me and allow wikipedia to carry me off to sleep. I find that British history articles put me to out the fastest. Ask me nothing about British history. I never get past the third paragraph. I must have started the article on Oliver Cromwell fifty times. I think he was a king or a catholic or a playwright or a hobbit or a character on Dr. Who or something. It all gets jumbled in my head. This is a far cry from my previous routine of sleeping on the floor halfway between the couch and the bed, with half removed beer soaked jeans tangled around my ankles.

So there you have it. The moral to this story, if there is one, if you’re young, learn to moderate; because if you don’t, down the road, you just might find yourself either drunk in a gutter or cleaning for fun. See? Now I’m talking like Polonius or some shit. How boring is that?*

*Oh yes, and just an aside, please no mindnumbing dull platitudes of support. I may be boring, but not so boring to not want to vomit when I read chick crap like that. Please, save that for your girlfriends.