Epiphanies and Talking Dogs
When I awoke the following morning I felt as though I’d had an epiphany of sorts but I couldn’t really be sure. What exactly is an actual epiphany supposed to feel like if you’ve never had that experience previously? I’d come up with some pretty good ideas in the past but I don’t imagine they would be considered epiphanies by any stretch of the imagination. If they were indeed epiphanies, then I’d have to say that the entire concept is flawed. It was certainly not the overwhelming, game-changing miracle that I’d been led to believe. Surely there had to be more to an epiphany than the vanilla appeal of ordinary common sense.
I was hopeful that the word hadn’t been rendered impotent by the gross negligence of new-age journalism. Please don’t tell me, that same turtleneck wearing, pseudo intellectual stereotype decided he could completely abuse the word as a way of describing his “really cool thought”. That would render epiphany metaphorical in nature and I don’t think that’s what it is. It has to mean more than that! I think it has to suggest a mind-blowing, other worldly kind of encounter. Anything less than that would seem rather pedestrian to me.
I suppose there is potential for skepticism with an epiphany claim. It’s received apprehensively, very similar to the claims of a UFO sighting. Most people believe that it could happen but they can’t definitively believe that it did happen. There is bound to be that immediate concern for your mental well-being, leading to a kind of cautious interrogation. There will be those highly irregular questions that folks are inclined to ask, to confirm suspicion. The snippets of a sage wisdom offered by the queries of old wives from generations past.
“Were you drunk? Maybe a little high?”.
“Have you been sleeping okay lately? Are you a little depressed?”
We all can have unusual dreams sometimes and that’s not even allowing for the possibility of fever, drugs or alcohol. And there is always that prospect of mental illness.
Famed serial murderer,The Son of Sam said that a neighbour’s dog had instructed him to commit terrible killings. Not surprisingly, he’s considered a lunatic by both mental health experts and historians today. Moses claimed that a burning bush instructed him to write the ten commandments and he’s revered as a prophet. It certainly gives one pause for thought before going public with an epiphany.
Whether defined as epiphany or an impactful self-realization, I woke up on that morning with a sudden sense of urgent purpose. It was like time itself was outside, pounding on my front door furiously like an angry cop, demanding a change in lifestyle. My days as a barfly were going to be coming to an end. It’s not like they had to end. I just didn’t feel like running from it anymore.
Again it could be those allegations of an acquired maturity that seem to linger behind you like a ghost or the smell of aged cheddar cheese. It’s invisible but it’s there nonetheless and you continue pushing onward nevertheless. That would explain this epiphany thing. Or maybe it’s just similar to the choice I made to go celibate. It’s the kind of decision that one would prefer to not be made for them by somebody else.
I’d been very fortunate to that point in my avoidance of the health issues often associated with smoking and drinking. While there could be no denying that I was fat, one could argue that it might’ve just happened anyway. Lung cancer, heart problems, and cirrhosis of the liver were the likely candidates that I might be forced to reckon with at some point. Just like the poignant realization of my own sexual decline, I was inclined to avoid that showdown as well if given the option.
It just seemed like a no-brainer to me. The negatives of being a barlounge lizard clearly outweighed the positives. If both of these factors were football teams then it would be a blow-out of historical proportions. The absolute worst superbowl of all time! Spiritual leaders would be encouraging the mob to put in the fix.
I’d had some unpleasant experiences along the way and still managed to enjoy the ride anyhow. I was also pretty sure that I wasn’t trying to desperately hold horrible memories at bay by drowning my sorrows either. I have always taken to drinking because that’s what I enjoyed doing. It had only been lately that I had found myself drinking simply out of habit and wondering if there couldn’t be more productive things that I would rather be doing with the limited time that I still had left. That’s basically what it was boiling down to.
I recognized that going cold turkey was probably not a great idea to begin with and to consider quitting both vices simultaneously would seem even more unadvisable still. I had been drinking beer and smoking cigarettes for close to half a century and there was bound to be some kind of withdrawal if I took that approach. Outside of being forced to change by going to jail or a stint in a rehab facility, the options seemed pretty limited. I was going to have to really put forth the effort to do this on my own. So I sat down that very morning and developed a gameplan.
I had recently taken to the treadmill anyways with the hopes of trying to shed a few pounds. Now I would have to ramp up the effort a bit to see how determined I could actually be. I really did want to rid myself of that inglorious beer gut and in order to do that I would realistically have to quit smoking. If changing bedsheets was akin to running a marathon then I was going to need more cooperation from my lungs. It was a substantial gut.
I called my doctor and the Universe must’ve been in agreement with my epiphany because he called in a Champix prescription for me that very same day and actually took time to talk to me briefly over the phone about what I could expect from this drug.
“You’re probably going to find yourself wanting to eat more in place of the cigarettes.” He warned.
“Try to eat carrots and celery sticks. Stuff like that, Chris. You gotta lose weight, bud.”
“I’ve been using a treadmill, Doc. Trust me, I’m trying to lose weight,” I explained, “but it’s hard to get motivated for exercise when you can’t breathe. That’s why I gotta quit smoking..”
“Okay, okay, I get it. But carrots and celery..You’re gonna want to replace that cessation of smoking and you’ll have to watch what you eat. Carrots and celery.”
Okay, I get it too! He was clearly hung up on the carrots and celery and I lied to him when I told him I would get into them. That is the unfortunate part of trying to eat healthier food, it tastes awful and it’s overly expensive. How many people actually enjoy eating carrots and celery sticks? I mean plain carrots and celery sticks..Not the kind that comes accompanied by a steaming plate of greasy wings already smothered in sauce. They may still be bland but at least there’s a creamy dipping sauce to make them seem somewhat palatable.
Carrots and celery sticks are for a different breed of person than I am. I don’t want to stop using soap and underarm deodorant. I don’t want to wear hemp sandals and vote for the Green party either. I just want to quit smoking and lose weight, goddamnit!
I knew what I was getting into when I thanked my doctor and hung up the phone. It was going to be a tough adjustment, there was no doubt about that. I was going to have to completely re-invent myself and that would mean trying to change patterns of behaviour that I’d spent the last 30 years of my life developing. That was when my marriage to Sharon crumbled and I definitely had a difficult time with that initial readjustment. One might even suggest that it did not go so swimmingly.
I was 33 when we broke up and, man, did I feel old. It actually seems funny to me now because I’m currently 30 years older than I was then, and somehow I feel like I’m even less of a grown-up. I’m pretty sure it’s not senility though. I just think you have come to the realization that your life is not a sprint, it is indeed a marathon. And I certainly was hopeful of having better results in this one than I’d gotten from the bed sheet fiasco the day before.
There is no shame in making mistakes along the way, as long as you can recognize that you’ve made them and try to take a lesson from having done so. Trust me, I’d made many mistakes leading to the eventual dissolution of my marriage and that was a long time ago. Following that, I would go on to spend a significant portion of the next 30 years sitting on various barstools around southern Ontario, where incidentally, I still continued to make mistakes. All the time alternating between loving the experiences and the guilty shame of knowing that perhaps I shouldn’t be loving it so thoroughly.
However, the time had come for something different. Perhaps it was a sort of personal metamorphosis, an inevitable evolution. Whatever it was, the wheels of change had already begun turning a full ten years prior. Perhaps they’d been spinning all along and I was too busy being young to take notice. Either way, it seemed many others had taken notice on my behalf.
In a ten year period I had gone from being a vibrant, handsome young man to a cynical, fat old drunkard. The sad transition was duly noted by those who had known me well. This was due to the obvious discrepancies between their past memories of me and the unsightly present version that would be currently standing before them.
The disappointment was easy to see in their eyes and occasionally someone would display the necessary frankness of asking about it, despite the possible awkwardness that inquiring might entail.
“What the hell happened to you?” I’d been asked more times than I’d care to remember.
And what can you say to them anyway? Do you just blame age? Or maybe a half-assed attempt at attributing your tragic decline to an unfortunate gene pool. Unless you prefer the company of idiots, nothing but the absolute truth should suffice. I have lived a life of excess. There! I’ve come clean about not being clean.
To begin with, it is not good practice to lie anyhow. It is even less advisable when you are an alcoholic because you may not always be able to recall the bullshit that you’d been expecting others to believe in the first place. Ultimately, I suppose it comes down to the fact that I’ve always wanted my family and close friends to love me as I love them. I suspect there is a vulnerability associated with unflinching honesty that makes you worthy of having your love be reciprocated.
I suppose that I could’ve just spared the reader a few hundred words and by merely saying “nobody’s perfect” but that almost seems like a lame excuse for avoidance of effort. I knew that a much more demanding effort was going to be expected from me after I had awoken that morning. Begrudgingly, I then decided to at least try and embrace that sentiment. At least think about the actual physical undertaking of the dramatic changes that were going to be required of me because it wasn’t going to be easy. Surely I wasn’t so lazy that I couldn’t think about trying..