Editor’s Journal – The experiment. Or: How to go booze free?

By John Dunphy, Managing Editor
   In my senior year of college at Alfred University, I decided I would take a vow of silence for four days. Why four days? I’m not sure. It might have had something to do with wanting to participate in class, but that couldn’t be it.
   I remember people asking me just why I had decided to shut up. Me, a person who lets all his guts spill out when he opens his mouth. Could he do it? Well, of course I did. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be hearing about it.
   The answer I gave then, as I would give now is simple: why not? Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, I was still on my self-important Mr. Zen kick at the time and probably said something to the effect of, “because we speak so much. And so much of what we say is so inconsequential, that to allow ourselves the opportunity to shut off that inconsequential noise for a while, is really an opportunity to get in touch with the infinite within us.” Or something like that.
   Last year, I decided sometime in early October that I was going to go vegetarian for a month. Ham was gone. Burgers were bye-bye. Pheasant was a pleasant memory (actually, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten rabbit, but it rhymes). Like the vow of silence several years before, when asked why I was trading my meaties for Wheaties, I replied, “why not?” Why not see if I control my stomach or if my stomach controls me?
   Vegetarianism was easy, besides one particular night when a bunch of friends and I went to the diner at 4 a.m. and they all got burgers while I got a Happy Waitress. Or, as I said in the Editor’s Journal entry of Oct. 30, 2006, “the Happy Waitress, an open-faced grilled cheese and tomato sandwich with bacon, sans the bacon. In effect, sans the ‘Happy.’ So, I ordered the Waitress. That doesn’t sound right.”
   It’s ironic now, a year later, that I would be dating a vegetarian and voluntarily opting to order vegetarian meals so I can share with her (and not feel too guilty about eating from her plate while having Tandoori Chicken all to myself. Mwah haha.).
   Maybe it’s something about this time of year — the change of temperatures, the change of seasons, and all of that — that directs me in the direction of change and challenge. This month, the month where everyone’s having a party and everyone’s having a toast to just about anything that would merit a toast, I have decided to swear off the drink.
   That’s right, this holiday season, Mr. Dunphy’s gone dry. No beer, no wine, no 12-year-old Scotch in a clear, icy-cold tumbler, giving off just the subtlest hints of spice. Until the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31, I am a teetotaler.
   Alcohol has never been much of a crutch. It has always been cigarettes that have pulled me this way and that with their stinky, seductive smoke. When I was alone in my apartment in Jinju, South Korea, trying to forget the girl I’d left behind in the States and trying to find a reason not to be depressed, it wasn’t a six-pack of Hite that quieted the demons — it was a 20-pack of Dunhills.
   And yet, excepting my late night desire for all things dead on my plate during last year’s veggie experiment, once I committed myself to laying off the hooch for December, it’s been relatively easy. Sure, I thought about having a sip of the 1989 whatever-he-was-drinking a friend at a party earlier this week kept calling “phenomenal,” but the pull wasn’t so much that it consumed me. So, I sipped my peppermint flavored water. Really, it’s just as good. No, really, it is. Really.
   Ultimately, the answer this time is the same as it was when I kept quiet for four days in 2002 and when I put the roast beast back on the shelf last year. I’m doing this just to see if I can.
   But, also, I’m doing it to see if I can’t. And, if I can’t — whether I think I drink too much, eat too much meat or won’t shut up — what does that inability to place limitations on myself for a limited time only say about who I am and what I value?
   I hope to answer that on Jan. 1, a cold bottle of brew in hand, tasting it like it was for the first time.
John Dunphy is managing editor of The Lawrence Ledger. He can be reached at [email protected].