All My Rowdy Friends

The Best View In Any City...

Photo of Benders in San Francisco by Kevin Kelleher from SF Gate

“I'm the only black mark
On the lady's life
The one mistake she ever made
Comes home to her each night
There's no way for her to hide it
All the world can see
She's got a drinkin' problem
And it's me”

-Gary Stewart

My friend Charlie liked to say “The best view of any city is the inside of a bar.”

I used to agree with him.

There’s lots to laugh at on a bar stool.

Bars are romantic places.

But hard drinking is a young man’s pastime.

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Hank Williams Jr., patron saint of getting fucked up, mostly because I’ve wanted to use this photo for months

My old rowdy friends stayed rowdy a lot longer than I’d expect anyone to.

Me, I felt like rowdy was an unforgiving path.

One I’d tried for years, and tried to get off several times.

At BitTorrent – this was in 2006 – after a few rough years at CNET, the only publicly traded, real-job company I ever worked for, I started off with a fresh attitude and I stopped stopping at the bar on the way home for a couple.

That worked for a while.

Running a record label didn’t help. Nor did moonlighting at a bar. Or DJing rock clubs.

I was functional, and I was a lot of fun. But eventually it was going to have to stop. You just can’t keep having debilitating hangovers.

It wasn’t until a particularly blurry SXSW a couple years ago that I decided to try complete sobriety.

At the time, I quit drinking entirely for 7 months.

It was incredible. Lost a ton of weight. Slept better every night. Anxiety down. Depression at bay. Productivity through the roof.

With a couple mild road bumps in between, I’ve kept drinking to a minimum, a bare minimum.

Grief is a bitch, by the way. Don’t drink at funerals.

More than anything else, I got myself into therapy and I started taking an SSRI. Lexapro. Every day.

I take a very minimal dose. It turns off the ruminator.

It adds a very thin layer of soft cushion between one hard idea and the next.

It also screws with my creative process, so writing is actually slightly harder than it used to be.

It’s all worth it.

I have acute anxiety. I have moderate depression.

I am from Minnesota and a lot of folks I know probably have the same diagnosis even if they don’t know it.

Alcohol does wonders to hide behind stoicism.

Mayslacks in Minneapolis, Photo by Matt Wellumson from Google Maps

I did not go the traditional recovery route, because I resist authority and I detest people telling me what to do. I detest punitive behavior.

I did what I did for myself, and for my family.

I struggle constantly with social pressure. I don’t go out as much as I used to, because, well, because it’s a lot.

Lunch is my friend. Lunch is easy and fun. There’s no need to drink booze at lunch (anymore).

Rock shows are a lot harder. And I love rock shows.

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The Latin American Club in San Francisco, photo from Yelp

I’ve read about the concept of “when does the cucumber become a pickle” – to describe the hard moment when alcohol abuse turns to alcohol disease.

You can’t unpickle a cucumber.

It's the social part. I lubricated my way through a hugely social life for the bulk of my adulthood.

Alcohol works so well as an addiction because drinking it makes you want more. Not only does it convince you that you’re the most charming and suave you’ve ever been, but when you crash hard, the only thing that makes you feel better is more alcohol.

What to do now, facing a room full of strangers without a lick of Dutch courage and the confidence instilled by a quick belt.

But I also find myself shedding the impulse to escape. I want to be in the now. I want to be creative and build things. I think as you grow older, and the world threatens to take away your viability, the urge to create grows ever stronger.

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I write about failure a lot.

Failure is in the eye of the beholder, obviously.

Some folks would look at my life and tell me, as they say everywhere, anymore, I’m “blessed.”

Some folks would look at it and shake their head. “He could have been someone.”

Some folks, like me, would say, “I’m standing right here.”

I read once that a famous investor likes putting money behind folks who have failed. After all, if you’ve made the mistake already, chances are you won’t do it again.

And yet via human nature, I have watched people I know relentlessly make the same mistakes over and over again.

Whether it’s trusting the same untrustworthy people or relitigating the same tired idea, you can’t fight obsession.

I have at least six gigs right now, as I’m fond of telling anyone who will listen. A music management job, a marketing gig for a recovery and sobriety thing, an advertising consultancy, closing up the last company I worked at, this Substack, and then that sixth category, of ideas yet to launch, or projects that have been brewing for years.

None of this is particularly failure oriented. As a matter of fact, I’m probably better positioned than anytime in my career. At 55.

Being over 50 is great! You’ve seen a lot. Sometimes it feels like you’ve seen everything, and every day is rewatching bits of old movies, made real in new flesh and binary bits.

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Some things need hard work and resilience. My friend David calls it Grit.

Drinking to hide your social insecurities is a cheat. A crutch.

I don’t know if I’m allergic to alcohol. But it certainly feels that way.

This is not a bad thing!

Lately I’ve been falling asleep if I even try to have a beer with friends. Like my central nervous system just shuts down with even the most minimal touch of booze.

I had thought moderation was the key to my sober-ish lifestyle.

It’s very likely even that one beer is not playing nice with some medication I’m on, so that’s a kind of blessing.

This idea of making everything effortless -- what's the goal?

To enable us to ascend to higher level of thought?

We're a nation of fat fucking pigs. I just ate a bag of Hershey Nuggets (toffee please, not that dark chocolate shit) sitting at my desk, looking up who directed Burt Reynolds movies.

Is this what our forefathers died for?

When you’re over 50, and you’re sending off carefully considered cover letters and, to you, sparkling, stuffed resumes of all your life achievements, and the radio silence back is absolutely deafening, it’s that chasm, that void, that drives you into depression, darkness, anxiety, defeat.

This is what we pull ourselves out of.

This is why sobriety is good.

This is why Grit is good.

This is why you get up in the morning.

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Thanks for reading Are You Experienced! I’m Nick Tangborn and this is my weekly piece about media, culture, career, society, all through the lens of a jaded Gen-Xer with a shoulder problem, a comic book collection and 55 years of anxieties. I try to get out 1500 words a week here. If you’d like to subscribe, I won’t get mad.

And if you want to buy me a cup of coffee, I will appreciate the hell out of you.