Thoughts On Dry January and a Rock Bottom Story from the Vault: Nine Months Sober
My 2014 attempt at Sobertober
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It’s been nine months since I last consumed alcohol, and about time for another rock-bottom story from my life as a drinker living in Canada during the coldest winter in forty years. Back when Dry January was just a whisper in the ear of the questioning millennial, Sobertober was all the rage. The idea was that you would go the entirety of the month of October without drinking any alcohol, and celebrate your short-lived sobriety health kick with a costumed piss-up at midnight on Halloween. At the time, I was living in a towering apartment building in downtown Montreal, almost exclusively inhabited by other international students. It was the kind of place where we never locked our doors because we knew all our neighbours and none of us had anything worth stealing. It was also the kind of place where, most nights, you could step off the elevator at any floor and pretty much count on some kind of party happening. I wasn’t about to miss out on Halloweekend, but for some reason I had decided to take up the Sobertober challenge, so I added a twist. To avoid the dreaded FOMO, I would start my sobriety a week early so that I could finish my thirty-one days in time to get well and truly shitfaced, in costume, for a whole week. A perfect plan. What actually happened was this:
As the clock ticked over to midnight on the last day of my sobriety, I did six shots of tequila in a row, to the raucous cheers of my friends on the eleventh floor. Then, my friend (who we’ll call Party Girl) and I hopped in a cab to a frat party on the other side of town. We stayed there for an hour before Party Girl got bored and we moved on to a bar, then to a strip club, then to another bar, and then finally back to our apartment building with the intention of rejoining the party on the eleventh floor. Unfortunately for me, Party Girl got off at the fifth floor instead to hook up with a guy she’d started the night with, and, not ready for my Big Blowout to be done quite yet, I texted the guy I’d given my number to at the frat party. The only information I remember about him besides his full name, which I won’t share here so we’ll call him Winnie the Pooh because that was the costume he was wearing, is that he grew up on a farm in Maine. I therefore…
