I used to Drink and Now I Don't

The end of my love affair with wine and beer wasn't terribly dramatic. The diagnosis wasn't pointing toward doom, it was pointing toward discomfort. The best cure? Take antacids and stop drinking coffee, wine and beer.

I tapered off. Wine wasn't much fun since my bout with throat cancer so I was only saying goodbye to beer. I ran through my stock at about one-quarter my usual rate. I have beer twice a week now, just one. I drink it with dinner and I drink it with reverence for the sheer generosity of the taste of it.

The first few days were weird. Kind of like when your dog dies or your best friend moves to California. All the usual beer times were empty-nothing to do. My friend the buzz was gone too. I felt sad in a low-key way and I stared at my water glass at dinner as if it were a cruel joke.
Then I got used to it. I made up the calories with ice cream and I contracted my diet away from the things that called for beer. In a few weeks it became the new normal and then something odd happened.

Some underground well of energy got tapped. It came out in the form of picture-making. I was seized by passions for making collages, drawings, illustrations of things that nobody had asked me to illustrate. My hard drive became cluttered, my computer slowed down. Files built up, sometimes two a day.
The same flood that brought the pictures carried off some diffidence that had characterized my relationship to my work. I started sending stuff out: pictures, poems, requests for reviews. And the universe, as my sweetheart says, seems to be answering my call.
Since I stopped drinking beer, I've had a book published, lined up two exhibits, gotten hungry and more curious about my world. Life is OK, sometimes it's good and occasionally it's filled with love and greatness.
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And something's lost. To pretend that there's no loss would be to imagine that everything I learned and did was just medicine. In fact, wine and beer put me in contact with the truth about civilization, with some vaultingly beautiful tastes and with some very interesting people.
I hope to hold the loss as both real and surmountable. I plan to tell the truth about it. Finally,
if my experience and my truth can stimulate someone to a larger vision of themselves and the world,
I'll drink to that.