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Yo, diary how’s it hanging? 

The prudent thing to do is to keep a curtain of silence — I picture it as velvet, and navy blue — around the working hours. Mentioning what happens at work, especially while naming names … hell, mentioning where you work at all … is the sort of modern internet taboo that has kept our free enterprise economy healthy and happy all these digital years. (Pay no attention to the general unhealthiness and schizophrenia of the economy since 1998, please.) As someone who likes and needs my job very much thank you much, I will keep this heavy curtain lowered, perhaps even neglected enough to gather dust. You know how dust gets attracted to velvet. Left long enough, it even cakes on there somehow, like wet flour on skin. Devil to get out, that dust.

So I love my job, but I come home from it like a man on parole nonetheless. The commute serves as a behavior hearing, during which my crimes are weighed carefully and it is decided by a committee of hundreds of cars whether or not I shall be permitted to go home in a timely fashion. Sometimes I need to be home, like, right away, so the commute drives me a bit mad. That’s when I call V and make her talk to me, sometimes all the way up to the apartment door.

This month is Sober September, as it has been for the past six years. The genesis of this holiday — which describes itself in the name, I hope — is a bender in 2004 of the sort that leads one to declare, in blurry insistence, the next morning, “I will never drink again.” And, depending on the seriousness of the situation, perhaps pronounce ‘again’ such that it rhymes with ‘pain’. While that rationale sustained the first few years of Sober September, in reality the tradition has kept itself alive because of two reasons:

Reason The First — I save a lot of money every September. 

Reason The Second — I remember, keenly, in my marrow, how much I absolutely love drinking alcohol.

I used to say that Sober September was flurry of self-discipline during which I proved to myself that I am not an alcoholic. I have since come to realize that not only am I some mild breed of alcoholic, but that I can, like a tantric lover, enhance the pleasure of my dependency by withholding it strategically until the last minute. These few days are the last minute. As Thursday approaches, I will reach a tingling, burgeoning fullness of sobriety that would cause even the priapetitic extremities of Sting to burst.

The real joy of being alcohol-free is the so-called “natural high,” but I am emphatically not talking about some sort of bulk-granola, fitness-freak, intellectual-vegan kind of natural high. I’m talking about a reversion to my high school state (I refrained from drinking until after I left for college), in which a general nervousness and heightened sense of drama brought out an absurd side of my personality that will stop at nothing to entertain itself. Most people think they’re really funny when they get drunk. When I’m drunk, I know I’m an idiot with a mediocre sense of humor; it’s when I’m stone sober that I fancy myself the next Steve Martin and prance about the living room with a red Christmas blanket draped over my head like a wimple.

All this amuses V, Lord bless and keep her, at least 70% of the time. Unfortunately for her, it also amuses me 100% of the time, so she must suffer through the other 30%. (For those keeping score, my gyrations of sub-Harpo mugging amuse the dog approximately 0% of the time, but then the only thing I’ve ever seen spark the flame of amusement in her black-as-a-Hell-chasm eyes is the bloody pelt of a roadkill squirrel that I let her sniff, just a little bit, once, before dragging her away by the neck.) 

So I get home at about 6 p.m. and spend the next four hours attempting to be amusing. Not the entire time, exactly. We did give Get Him to the Greek about 90 minutes to do the amusing for me, and thanks to Puff Daddy (yeah, Sean Combs, I know, but I’m old and white and suburban and I still think he wears shimmering red track suits when nobody’s looking), it mostly did.

What, diary, you thought these entries would have a point?

Today’s footnotes:

Priapus

Cleaning velvet

Wimple

Puff Daddy