Once upon a time, I was an alcoholic. I don't still claim to be, and now I prefer the term "ex-drunk." People didn't like to hear that in AA, which is partly why I quit going to meetings a few months into my sobriety. The way I see it my addictive personality happened to momentarily latch on to alcohol, just as it had many other less destructive hobbies and compulsions over the years. Probably because as a brewer I had easy access to large quantities of it, and rarely did I have to break out the wallet to support the habit. Getting fucked up all the time felt more acceptable when everyone around me could keep up, and it didn't seem to have an impact on my bank account. The path of least resistance, it seems, is a slippery slope.
Figuring out my current fixation and whether or not it's beneficial to me (example: fly-fishing vs. cigarettes) is so much more important to me than beating myself up forever over one in particular. It's something I need always to be aware of and keep tabs on; left unchecked, even the most benign of addictions have the potential to leave me broke and homeless. Diving head-first into a new fascination is something I am known for, but I try not to immediately define myself by it or get too disappointed if I lose interest. I am not surprised by the relapse rate among alcoholics, and I think a lot of it has to do with them continuing to call themselves one even when all of the symptoms of being a booze hound have faded. I am no longer an alcoholic just like I am no longer a home-brewer.
Many would have alcoholics believe that the next drink is a wolf waiting at the door. I would suggest that it’s just another drink that we don’t need.
After one awful day in December, I finally snapped out of it. Turns out this often talked about "moment of clarity" is real and something profound. It isn't so much a realization that you have a drinking problem; by this point you know you have one and have already tried cutting back, or at least thought about it or made an empty promise to a loved one that you would. It's more about finally recognizing all of the damage this habit has done to your life. At this moment the full weight of the situation hits you like a ton of bricks. The veil drops, and somehow you are unable to continue lying to yourself and everyone around you. It becomes painfully obvious that no, everything's not OK, and in fact, there is a huge mess that needs to be cleaned up. Hopefully, at this point the addicted person has a "better now than never" instead of a "fuck it, I'm in too deep" attitude. The former has always been more my style, and luckily that's what I went with; today it has been two years and six months since I quit my brewing job and vowed never to drink again.
Quitting didn't seem like it would be all that hard. My initial plan was to become a hermit. If I cut off all contact with everyone and everything that triggered my desire to get hammered I figured I would be fine. What I hadn't planned on was having to fill the Grand Canyon-sized hole of extra time that had suddenly appeared in my life. No more 60-hour-a-week job, no more getting a beer with my friends, no more killing time sipping whiskey and chain-smoking on the patio. Holy shit was I ever bored.
Enter: fly-tying. I had picked up fly-fishing two seasons before. That season leading up to my going dry I had made a real go at it, fishing more regularly and reading book after book about the finer points of angling with a fly. My days on the river were some of the only times you could find me without a beer in my hand. This was not because I didn't want to drink, but because I was lazy and beer is heavy to carry. Recently I had been considering taking up tying and even scored a box of old fly tying stuff for a song off of craigslist. The gentleman that sold it to me didn't seem to know what he had, that or he was too close or distant from the poor old guy that previously owned it and couldn't stand to see it anymore. Except for the dull scissors and five-dollar vise, I still use the old, worn tools that originally came with the kit, and my deer hair sedges get their wings off the same aging patch of deerskin that was used to tie my first dry fly.
Up until then, I had yet to get into the box, but with all of this new-found free time on my hands and a sober mind that needed distracting, I tore into it like some punk kid into another child's birthday presents. My first attempts were horrible, nightmare-inducing creatures. They were abominations. Size 4 caddis pupae, parachutes with soft hackle wings. I didn't know a good dry fly hackle from a CDC, but I was in deep. I would spend hours at the vise, burning through instructionals, tying every pattern I could with the wrong materials on the wrong hooks and loving every second of it. It's a good thing that at first I didn't care about doing everything correctly, you get more practice in when you aren't too worried about the particulars.
When you are a serial hobbyist, you love and savor those first hundred or so hours of being a newb. Being a bonafide beginner only lasts so long, and at that beautiful, long-awaited moment when the new obsession evolves into a useful skill, a little more magic gets sucked from the world; the lingo has mostly been learned, and the new thing isn't so mysterious anymore. This pastime that I had imagined lonely, weather-worn old fly-fishers doing while puffing on pipes and muttering to themselves in dark dens has since been made equal in my mind to arts and crafts for grown men.
That January I fished the Arkansas coming out of Pueblo Reservoir for the first time. I was just getting acquainted with the wonders of tailwater in a state with a never-ending fishing season, and I had an Altoids box packed with my pitiful attempts at the classics. To my surprise, the fish were rising, and even more shockingly they were taking my flies as if they were the ones I bought in the fly shop. One sixteen inch rainbow took my wonky size 12 parachute, and another slurped what can only be described as Frankenstein's Caddis. Both flies fell apart after one fish, but they were my flies, and I had never felt such a feeling of accomplishment. I had just rearranged my entire life and given up everything I had devoted myself to professionally, but it wasn’t until these fish looked up and sipped those flies that I was officially reborn.
I don’t need any of those fuckers, I thought to myself, in reference no-one and everyone at the same time.
That day I fished the Arkansas, a novice in both fly-fishing and tying, sober as the day I entered this world, and feeling as new. I imagined my previous obsession floating away down the river, disappearing into the mist rising from the surface, out of sight and out of mind. Something else had taken its place.
My name is Bryan, and I am obsessed with trout and the bugs that they eat.