Too Much Information Time: Alcoholism

     I quit smoking six years ago. It sucked. I became perpetually cranky (er), I got severe headaches for almost a month, I couldn't sleep, and I thought about cigarettes nearly every waking moment of the day. With severe addictions, it truly becomes a matter of dependence. I equate the impulse to have a cigarette with the urge to eat. When you've gone too long without eating, your body lets you know "Hey, maybe you should eat, idiot." If you ignore it, it insists more loudly. And it doesn't stop.

      Quitting smoking was almost like that. I may as well have been denying myself water and trying to convince my body that I wasn't thirsty. Addiction operates on those same basic impulse levels: Eat, drink, sleep, have a cigarette, find something to hump (maybe that last one is just for sex addicts).  Smoking was like breathing; the desire came from somewhere deeper than the conscious mind. It wasn't a craving, the way one might prefer to have a slice of pizza instead of a bowl of ice cream; it was simply something I had have to have to get through the day.

     Six years later and it still isn't completely gone. When I smell someone smoking I can still remember how it tasted, and how it made me feel. And I find myself desperately wanting a cigarette. I don't often act on the impulse; it's been long enough that the feeling is just a dim memory, and once the rational mind kicks in the craving quickly passes (perhaps it helps that cigarettes are three times as expensive as they were when I quit). But in that brief moment, when you're first exposed to the stimulus, the impulse is as strong as ever.

     For me, drinking alcohol feels the same. Only with an added wrinkle: it seems like everyone I know is drinking all the time. Fear of secondhand smoke and all the legislation that's passed in recent years has made it easier to stay away from cigarettes because you're rarely exposed to them. I'm pretty sure you have to be a ninja to smoke in public nowadays. But drinking isn't shunned; it's encouraged. If you're going out with co-workers, friends, your wife, your family; odds are some (or all) of you are going to have a drink. As someone who has had  trouble controlling the quantity of alcohol I regularly consumed at certain points in my life, this makes fighting the habit infuriating. And it makes quitting cold turkey, as I did with smoking, a virtual impossibility.

     So how do you walk the line between casual and heavy drinking? Between being sociable and being a full blown alcoholic? The following has worked for me:

     1) Try not to keep alcohol in the house. If you're like me then if there's alcohol anywhere around you, you'll drink it. There's no such thing as buying a twelve pack but stopping at six and saving the rest for tomorrow. Not drinking when there's liquor around feels about as natural as sitting down to take a piss. So just don't keep it in the house, and don't buy so much of it to begin with.

     2) Drink with other people. You're likely to drink more at their pace, and if you're a heavy drinker then odds are that pace will be slower than yours. You'll likely be drinking out in public, which is more expensive, and so you're not as likely to just keep going until you get tanked (unless you're wealthy, I suppose). Plus, in this setting it's more about being social and less about self-medicating.

     3) Stay honest. If you catch yourself lying about how much you drink to other people, stop it. Don't buy a six pack and chug it down before your wife gets home and then take out the trash to hide the evidence. If you're hung over, don't tell everyone at work you've got the flu. This rule is probably the hardest, because these types of behaviors happen when you've reached that point when you know you've got a problem and you're trying to stop, you just can't yet. That's when you're at your most desperate (and pathetic). Just ride it out.

     4)Find something else to fill the hours of the day you used to spend drinking. Go running. Write a stupid blog.  Make it something fun, so that you look forward to it, like a reward.

     There you go. That's my foolproof method. Practice it, and it'll still feel impossibly hard, and hopeless, and it won't work for a long, long time. But just keep doing it. Remember how long it took for you to become so tolerant of alcohol? To stop getting hangovers? Right.

   

H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Sacrilege

 

     I grew up in an extremely religious household. It's not my intent to discuss religion here; I only bring up the subject so that I can properly contextualize my state of mind such as it was when I was first introduced to the writing of H.P. Lovecraft.

    Before Lovecraft, the only worldview I'd been exposed to was one in which humans were, aside from God and his angels, the most important beings in all of creation. Men were given dominion over everything that walked upon the face of the earth, over the fish in the sea, and our souls were the ultimate currency in a timeless war between angels and demons. At the age of 8 (give or take a year), this is what was real to me. And then Lovecraft came along like a wrecking ball.

     This was rural, white bread America in the late 80's / early 90's. There was no internet. Orwell was the next writer that would shape my worldview, and that was still several years off. Kafka was more than a decade away.

     I was always kind of a strange kid. I was obsessed with Halloween. I spent my weekends watching old black and white horror films, and I drew little cartoons of monsters and skeletons during church service. The first time I saw an H.P. Lovecraft anthology on the shelf I knew absolutely nothing about the author, it was the artwork on the cover that I found appealing. There were images of dark figures shrouded in robes with their rib cages visible, monstrous, blood covered faces leering through windows, and corpses trapped in the webs of prickly, metallic spiders with thousands of eyes. (I would later see this same artwork on the cover of a Meatloaf cassette for his hit single "Objects In The Rear-view Mirror...". Unfamiliar with Meatloaf I wrongly assumed that, based on the cover art, his music must be awesome; and hastily purchased the tape, to my eternal regret.)

     In the span of two months I tore through three collections of Lovecraft's work. Once I dug in to the stories I found it wasn't the ghastly monsters that were most appealing to me about his work, nor was it Lovecraft's knack for suspense. It was the fact that Lovecraft's worldview was the complete opposite of everything I'd been exposed to in my life up to that point. I'd always believed that the counterpoint to a kind and loving God was Satan; but after reading these stories I realized that the true opposite of God was entropy, nothingness. Cosmic indifference.

     To monsters like Lovecraft's Cthulhu, mankind was no different than any other animal. We were ants beneath their notice; occasionally given the slightly greater significance of serving as livestock for these ancient gods when they would awaken from their centuries long torpor with a most terrible hunger. And then there were creatures like Azathoth, the blind idiot god to whom mankind may as well not have existed at all.

     The mythology in these tales was so dense, even complete with it's own (un)holy book in the Necronomicon, that to my young mind there didn't seem to be much difference between Lovecraft's stories and the tales that I'd been raised on, of talking donkeys and men living in the bellies of whales. Back then, it didn't seem any less real.

     Having been involved in several fiction anthologies and other Lovecraft themed projects, I've found myself recently giving much thought to what makes the man's tales so enduring in popular culture. His worldview is bleak, his stories lack diverse characters (and in many cases even a relatable protagonist); and of course there's the ever present and not so subtle racism, that, while simply a product of the times he lived in, is still horribly offensive.

     So why do people keep coming back?

     In my estimation, it's because there's just something in the notion that the universe simply does not give a damn about you that rings true for each of us. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that that's the truth of the matter; but this is horror fiction. By design, it's meant to be an exploration of the darker side of human thought. And I'm sure most of us, at some point or another, have experienced that moment of feeling completely insignificant.

     Anyway, for fans, or for those of you who've never read Lovecraft and would rather read a pale imitation instead of going directly to the source, you can check out the Whispers From The Abyss anthology from 01publishing, which features my story "The Neon Morgue", here:

   Whispers From The Abyss

    Just kidding about that pale imitation part. It's really quite good, I promise.

     Happy reading, and have a very eldritch new year!

Update: Whispers From The Abyss was successful enough in ebook format that 01publishing have released a print version, available here:

http://www.amazon.com/Whispers-Abyss-Greg-Stolze/dp/0983923051/ref=sr_1_1_twi_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1414712363&sr=8-1&keywords=whispers+from+the+abyss

Also in the works, Whispers... Volume 2:

http://01publishing.com/2014/10/20/for-immediate-release-open-call-for-submissions/

Guess it's time to start writing...