Back at the dawn of time, when I was young, the drinking age was 18.
Actually, it had changed to 21, but somehow, I ended up “grandfathered in” to the 18 Year Old Drinking Age.
To celebrate turning 18, I went out and bought myself a six pack of Augsburger Dark, hid it in the garage, and over the next several weeks, attempted to teach myself to like dark beer.
I turned 48 a few years ago.
I’d been cutting down on the drinking, sporadically, for the last few years.
At 48, I just thought, 30 years, that’s plenty. Maybe it is time to take a break.
I tried off and on, and probably did drink quite a bit less, but I still had the odd bout of binge drinking.
In fact, drinking less overall, nearly made the occasional binge drinking almost inevitable. Once you start surrendering your tolerance, (which was never really much of a tolerance to start out with,) then practically any drinking ends up being binge drinking.
Made it to 50 towards the end of 2014, still thinking, “enough drinking is enough drinking”.
But, the holidays are a hard time to stop drinking.
However, my wife and I usually take January off from drinking anyway, or at least try to. I don’t think, especially since I started bartending, that I’ve ever made it more than a couple weeks, without drinking at all.
So I thought, well, I at least need to prove it to myself that I CAN not drink.
I’m a grown up, I should be able to handle it, if I can handle it.
So, starting with January 1, 2015, I’ve been dry.