I’ve been tackling my (first) book with enthusiasm, and it’s been pretty astonishing how readily the stories and experiences have been rushing back to me, all of them in a helpfully linear fashion.  I have duffel bags and duffel bags containing years and years of journals (“diaries” just sounds so juvenile) to aid me in any sort of specific recollections I might require, but so far, I haven’t had to go down to my building’s terrifying basement storage room and haul any of them out.  Despite having engaged in countless knife fights with my brain cells over the years, it’s a relief to know that I’m not suffering from any sort of early-onset dementia.  I remember whole chunks of dialogue and trivial exchanges I’ve had with people I only met once or twice; outfits that I was wearing at particular places and times; meals I’ve eaten, including where and with whom; sexual experiences both embarrassing and sublime; the names and faces of students I’ve taught, despite there being thousands from around the world…it’s all up there, trivia and visuals and moments crammed into the alcohol-scooped gaps in my grey matter, begging for release.  Once I let it all out on the page, I have a feeling my hippocampus will at last collapse on itself and I’ll be gnawing arrowroot biscuits in some kind of local hospice.    

Many writers will do absolutely anything to avoid writing as much as possible, and you can count me in on that procrastination.  Once I get going, however, I become lost in the act.  It’s always been that way, and it’s always been a satisfying phenomenon where time is suspended and dissolved and I eventually snap out of a near-trance. Now, I’m not editing anything as I go, but simply getting it all out there for my initial raw manuscript, ensuring that all the material has been put down on the page.  I can then go back and revise and remove; that’s how it’s supposed to be done, I’ve heard.  Everyone’s got their own method, but this is how I’m going about my big project.  Besides, I’ve got a 9-5 day job that I don’t mind but which can indeed be draining (what, you think I’ve actually been supporting myself in Vancouver on meager freelance jobs and this pro bono blog?  You’re cute.  Raise your mug and have a hearty LOL in your own honour), so I need to keep up the momentum when I actually get down and get into it. 

While I have a fairly detailed outline for the book’s sections, content, and direction, this is all bound to change as things develop and take on a life of their own, so I’m not going to state exactly what it’s about, but I will say that alcoholism and teaching ESL will comprise a nice chunk of the writing.  I didn’t willingly nail myself to those two crosses because I thought it was adorable.  

…what I certainly didn’t expect, however, was to be so profoundly and immediately affected on a visceral level.  Hurtling myself back into two decades’ worth of weirdness–excavating random events and questionable milestones and life-defining rites of passage–has been startling in that my intellect is often eclipsed by the feelings and emotions that are dredged up and lived again, not to mention the physical reactions that arise when combing through this long-buried stuff.   

Here’s an example:   

My personal Hall of Shame has corridors that stretch to the rings of Saturn, and one legendary framed portrait shows me in the staff washroom of my last language school, hurriedly gulping down some alcohol before my 9 a.m. class.  This wasn’t just an isolated incident, by the way.  

Yeah, I can hear you making all sorts of judgmental noises denoting your shock and disgust. What, none of you have ever kick-started your work day with le cheveux du chien? (Since my French is somewhat limited and I doubt the English expression is translated literally as I have done here, Google A.I. gave me the crap equivalents of boire de l’alcool pour soigner une gueule de bois and soigner le mal par le mal) Liars, the whole lot of you.  And yes, being on vacation “counts” as questionable round-the-clock drinking if you’re waking up to a boozy beverage, so whether you’re shotgunning a Grower’s Cider on the train while heading to the office or sucking down a Mai-Tai before heading downstairs for your continental breakfast at the Hilton, you’re just as much of a degenerate as I was.  

This wasn’t just taming a hangover with some desperate glugs, but–I didn’t know this until it was too late–I was actually staving off the effects of withdrawal.  If a hangover is like having a really heinous head cold, alcohol withdrawal is something like late-stage pancreatic cancer: Indescribable agony.  My drink of choice for the mornings used to be the controversial Fireball Whiskey, which I’m sure plenty of you are familiar with and hold strong opinions about, and which has established a very clear-cut reputation in the world of questionable hooch.  Utter that name in front of some seasoned drinkers, and you’ll never get a subtle reaction.  There are even whispers that Fireball and whatever hell-spawned ingredients it contains will cause esophageal cancer, but it’s not like anyone who drinks it actually cares about that.

I was busy recalling those mornings of popping into the stall at around 8:50 am to give myself a few blasts before walking into the classroom, and it went like this: Rummaging around for the small plastic bottle with the red-and-gold label; fervently unscrewing the cap; having a few not-fucking-around swallows of the dense, sticky goop; tasting the spicy, sugary liquor; the heat of the cinnamon flavour and the booze itself hitting my cheeks and gut and chest…

…and I started getting nauseous.  I was right there, smelling it, seeing it, tasting it, feeling its effects.  Unlike some former addicts who might get triggered into extreme cravings by thinking back to how they abused their drug of choice, living through this again in a very detailed way made me feel unwell, repulsed, and upset.  The last time I ever went near Fireball Whiskey was June of 2018 (among other useless memories, I can easily pinpoint the last time I ever went near a particular category of alcohol, such as the time I permanently swore off gin in November 2002 for reasons unimportant to this essay), because Fireball had finally done its job of making me violently, paralyzingly ill.  It didn’t signal the end of my alcohol consumption–that would continue to be an ongoing battle–but Fireball was dead to me after an unacceptable last tango with the stuff.  I quite honestly haven’t thought about it until I was describing it a few days ago, and I was shocked at how intensely my body recoiled without even sampling any of the sludge. 

If I keep getting this unpleasant reaction while I write about alcoholic slavery, there’s a very good chance I will eventually be conditioned into involuntarily spewing onto the sidewalk every single time I walk past a liquor store, which isn’t even an unreasonable reaction.  Who knows?  Maybe I’ve stumbled across the literary equivalent of Antabuse.  

Here’s another example: 

We all know music (and scent) can be a potent, shocking form of instant time travel, especially if it has been ages since you’ve heard a certain tune that evokes an extraordinary epoch in your life.  While not a major part of the output I’ve been working on, the years 2004 – 2007 were noteworthy for being among the happiest of my entire life.   I had moved to Victoria from the uninspiring likes of Vancouver–don’t ask me why I moved back here, do not even ask me right now–and everything changed for the better: I became a powerhouse on the drum kit, I created and happily wrote for a couple of my own websites (both long since dismantled by the webmaster, a predatory little scumbag of whom I eventually had enough), I played my own compositions at open mic nights, I was part of the local Doukhobor community, I made lots of new friends, I underwent a drastic personal makeover (or “glow up,” as they call it now) upon turning thirty, and I got more dick than a Davie Street glory hole. 

Post-personal renovation, almost twenty years ago.  What I learned: Guys of all ages like hot chicks.

However, this was where my alcohol consumption was really starting to straddle the line between “you’re just young and healthy enough to keep partying like this” and “you’re going to be in deep shit very soon.”  That deep shit would, depressingly, keep me mired down for a long while to come.  Now, I had discovered Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, and the timeless joy of their band Big Star a couple of years prior to my relocation to Victoria, and their music was a regular part of my listening experience.  

(Only in the early 2000s could you sandwich Big Star’s “September Gurls” between Interpol’s “Obstacle 1” and Sloan’s “The Rest of my Life” on your mix CD and have it all make perfect sense, even though you couldn’t appreciate the visual treats of the men in those bands until YouTube came along.)

Despite being single and freewheeling and enjoying the perks of both, I did sometimes get very maudlin while drinking alone, as one does.  A major motivation to start anew on the island was my breakup with a guy I’ll call Michael who lived just outside of San Francisco, and with whom I maintained a long-distance relationship for a year.  We, of course, visited each other whenever we could, talked on the phone almost every night, and wrote to one another constantly (not just email, but actually long-form letters by hand that we’d throw into the post, just so romantically).  Michael and I had a lot in common, including a passion for prose, good taste in music and movies, a similar sense of humour, and…the bottle.  Alcohol wasn’t necessarily the main reason I had to break up with him, but it was a dominating factor, along with his complete lack of ambition in life or ability to understand why becoming a responsible man was imperative to a future together.  When we began dating, he was 24 to my 27, and the relatively minor age gap sometimes felt like a chasm.

We loved drinking together, we had fun drinking together, but there was a limit to how far we could go together, and I knew it.  I moved to the island and had no shortage of male companionship, but there were some nights when I pined for What Could Have Been, listening to the music he and I had enjoyed together while knocking back whatever I felt like drowning in.

A week or so ago I was listening to a randomly-selected Big Star / Bell / Chilton mix on my phone, and this heart-pulverizer came on, and it was, shockingly, 2005 or 2006 again in stark relief: I was right there again, in my big apartment on Balmoral Road with its bead curtain and hand-drawn posters on the walls, polishing off a magnum of wine or half a bottle of Stolichnaya while blasting tunes and re-reading his handwritten letters, some of them sweetly wrapped around a sliver of Irish Spring so I could smell him from far away.  It’s only through the grace of a merciful God that smartphones were nonexistent at that time–in fact, I didn’t even get my first cell phone until 2008, long after they had become commonplace–because there is 100% chance I would have engaged in the sort of abysmal drunk texting that has actually become a true global pandemic requiring isolation and distancing, if not a mandatory vaccine.

The weird part is, I wasn’t actually in love with Michael.  I liked him just fine, but I had never loved him.  So why the weepy dramatics?  Oh yeah: I was drunk and making a big deal out of nothing, which is pretty much the definition of what happens when you’re hammered to the gods.  There is just no dignity to be had with that drug, is there?

It was very, very weird to be in those places again.  I hope this isn’t going to be the case throughout my first draft, because I don’t have time for sentimentality (or trauma, or longing, or regret, or any of those things we endure when thinking about the past) when I’m trying to get something done.  

And get it done I will.  

Now.  I hope all of you–most of you, anyway–have a beautiful week.  It’s already warmer here and I think I’m going to grow a small garden on my balcony for the summer, not to mention redo my kitchen and paint a feature wall in my bedroom.  I reckon that I’m stuck in this place–a one-bedroom apartment in the West End for well below market price–until I get a bucket of money and reveal my true aristocratic nature by heading straight back to East Vancouver.  

Snootily,

Nadya.