Playing the Tape Forward – How To Avoid that First Drink

I don’t manage to get to many AA meetings. I enjoy movies at home and hanging out with my pregnant lady to overcommit to whining about my problems to other sober drunks.

To bolster my resolve in regard to staying sober, I listen to a podcast, which means I can listen to someone talk about sobriety in the comfort of my own living room, where, unlike the American Lutheran Church that hosts my AA group, wearing pajamas and eating fruit salad with my hands isn’t frowned upon.

“Is that bourbon in your milk?”

One of the best bits of advice I’ve gotten from this podcast is to play the tape forward. It’s a technique to overcome cravings to get out-of-your-mind shitfaced when they occur.

Ten months sober, I’ve accepted they’ll always be a part of my life, like public transport and that neighbor who drills a hole into his wall every Sunday afternoon.

And like those things, I have to have a strategy to make my peace with them. In the case of the former, I read fiction with the intensity of my fifteen-year-old self reading his first porn magazine. And in the case of the latter, I sit on my sofa, seethe, and hope he someday gets diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that has a less than ten-percent five-year survival rate.

Only kidding.

I’m more of a wish-AIDS-upon-my-enemies type of guy.

Anyway, the cravings thing.

Just last week I got one. I was walking home Friday evening, mere minutes away from arriving home, looking around at the world and thinking, You know what? Autumn’s way better than I thought it was, when bam! I thought about how great it would be to drink my favorite beer after all this sober time.

Bam!

My mouth became instantly dry, I started limbering up my air-guitar fingers for the solo I’d do on my balcony in the early hours of the next morning, and I no longer thought trees totally rock an Autumnal palette.

I had to get my sobriety lasso out, say, “Whoa there, horsey!” and reign myself in. I was close to falling off the wagon, thinking I could totally drink like a normal person again, and if I couldn’t, I could always just get sober again.

What did I do? Instead of listening to the bullshit fantasy I’d created, I wandered over to the metaphorical bookcase in my mind, and took down the VHS cassette that’s labeled ‘Actual Likely Consequences of Taking Drinking Your Favorite Beer.’

Then I sighed, went over to the VHS, bent at the waist, and put it in.

This is the movie that I watched:

I arrive home, giggling like a girl, a shopping bag full of my favorite beers. If you look into my eyes, there’s already a little shame and guilt there. Despite this, I sit down on the sofa, and as though I’m studying some lost artifact from a once-thought-mythical Egyptian tomb, I study it for two or three seconds, and then decant it into a beer glass.

The movie skips ahead, and it’s the end of the night. I look disappointed. I would, as drinking’s nowhere near enough as good as I thought it was. I go to bed, my resolve to stay sober seemingly strengthened for the next day.

But something illogical happens. The movie skips ahead again. It’s the next morning, and even though drinking’s made me feel like shit, and even though it wasn’t nearly as fun as thought it was, I’m sitting on the sofa, eating my breakfast, contemplating getting shitfaced again, just to find out if I can rediscover the magic it had when I was in my early twenties. And before I know it, I’m out the door.

The camera that’s filming this shitty movie is stationary, set up on a tripod in the corner of my living room, where I did most my drinking, so I didn’t get to see myself go to the store to get more booze. I fast forwarded to the part where I arrive back.

It’s the same result. My evening’s a C-minus, which would be pretty good for a Wednesday, but the evening I was watching being filmed is a Saturday.

A little bored, I fast forwarded weeks, to some weekend. I’m noticeably heavier, and my skin looks like shit, but that I figured that’s probably from eating junk food as a replacement for alcohol, which I couldn’t have carried on drinking. But holy shit! I am drinking. And what’s that in my glass? White Zinfandel? Why the hell have I continued? I proved to myself it was shit over the course of two evenings. The idiot in the film broke the deal! It was just supposed to be one evening, two max, if I couldn’t control it.

So I fast forward to next Monday. I was shaking my head watching myself, as that loose cannon’s getting shitfaced on Mondays, now, too. Just a second. Yep, and Tuesdays.

I fast forwarded to years down the line. I squinted as I looked at the timestamp. It’s during the day, on a Thursday, and I’m drinking. Maybe I’ve got the day off work, or maybe I’m ill. I watched myself for a couple minutes and saw no sign of illness, so I skipped ahead to the next week. There I am again, relaxing on the sofa, and is that a laptop on my lap. I hadn’t done that since… oh, shit. I just realized I’ve been fired and I’m searching for new day gigs, and one where being an overweight, constantly drunk slob are marketable attributes.

Finally, I fast forwarded to around five years in the future. Someone else is sitting in my apartment. Some guy with his kids and his wife. There’s a knock at the door. The guy and his wife look at each other a second, deciding who’s going to answer the door. They look a little worried, like they might know who it is.

The guy gets up and goes over to the door. He opens it, says, “Not you again,” and attempts to close the door. But before he can, some piss-soaked, unkempt shit show barges past him into the living room. He’s clearly disorientated, and definitely drunk, and appears to homeless, as his naked big toe on his right foot is poking out of a hole in his sneaker. The guy’s wife starts screaming, and the homeless man attempts to calm her down by saying he just wants to look for his DVD copy of Stepbrothers.

And then I thought, That’s weird; if I were a hobo and forgot a movie before being evicted from my home, that’s the one movie in the world that would motivate me to all intents and purposes break in to retrieve it.

It dawns on me. That hobo’s me.

Back to that Friday night, with ten months’ sobriety. In my mind, I ejected the VHS tape, placed back on the shelf. I was no longer thinking about drinking.

I was thinking about how cool it was that I could go up to my pregnant girlfriend, who was sitting in my apartment, waiting for my sober ass. It was a Friday night. So I wasn’t going to an AA meeting. We were going to watch a movie instead. Thirty minutes later, we’d eaten, and were browsing movies to watch. She was standing by the shelf, looking as big as a house, and she turned to me, asked me if I had any recommendations.

“I don’t,” I said. “All I know is that I don’t want to watch Stepbrothers.”

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