If a cow ever got the chance...

This whole sobriety thing reminds me of quitting smoking in 1998. I smoked a pack a day (at least) from spring of my freshman year of college to the fall of my senior year. Then I quit--cold turkey--in the middle of a semester abroad, not because anything had happened, just because it seemed to be time. The consequences--cigarette breath, escalating prices, tobacco stench--were starting to outweigh the benefits, and it just felt like I'd outgrown the habit. It wasn't horribly difficult, although I'd actually quit for about a month already at the request of a guy I'd been dating over the summer (and then when he cheated on me with his ex-girlfriend and a stagehand in Kiss of the Spider Woman, I took it up again to get back at him). So I'd already had some practice.

This whole no-cigarettes-ever thing lasted about three years, during which time I lived in deathly fear that I might give in and have a drag of someone else's and immediately rush out and buy a carton. I had dreams about smoking. Then one night, out with Cyril at a drag queen show, I just gave in and bummed a cigarette off of him. It was probably the single best cigarette I've ever had. Since then I'll smoke very occasionally--usually at bars, as Lass can attest. It amounts to about a pack a year, and this is OK with me. It's a social thing--I don't smoke to relieve stress or because I'm self-destructive, and probably someday I'll cut it out altogether without making any big vows to do so, because smoking is kind of stupid.

I want drinking to be like that too, someday, and I think it can be. There's so much precedent--I'm a 95 percent vegan as well as a 95 percent nonsmoker. (All that means to me is that if I really want cheese and crackers one day, I can have it; or if somebody makes cookies for me and they contain eggs, I won't turn them down; but my own cooking is always vegan and I try to minimize the amount of dairy and egg products in my diet. Meat is where I draw the line...) For me, this 95 percent vegan lifestyle is effortless--I don't even have to think about it anymore. But I would have to work really hard to be 100 percent vegan (and find some nonleather running shoes that fit, cause the ones I got off the Internet really didn't cut it)--and for now, at least, it's just not worth it. (Although, just as another digression, the thing that does make me want to go completely vegan is that everyone [friends, coworkers, family] already thinks I am--no matter how many times I give them this same boring explanation that I just typed out for you and say VEGETARIAN, they still call me a vegan. Which bothers me because if I am a representative of the vegan tribe, I'm a shitty one--so maybe I should just make the minor adjustments necessary to fit the label and shut up.)

Clearly I don't mind a little ambiguity--if smoking and veganism can be like this in my life, drinking can be that way too. Maybe I can have a glass of wine with dinner, or a Manhattan at the bar instead of glass after glass of club soda with a side order of bitterness and seething resentment and self-pity. I hate club soda.

But I can't do this until I learn how to drink like a responsible person, instead of a fourteen-year-old home alone on Saturday afternoon with an unlocked liquor cabinet. One drink might be fine, this slow steady soddening process is not. And right now it all seems like poison anyway.

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