Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

After a slew of melancholy posts this week, it seems a good time for this slight change of pace, with a hopeful rendition of ‘Blue Skies’ from Ella Fitzgerald to set the tone. We’ve had some incredible blue skies lately, in between some dreary gray days – and without the latter the former would shine quite as brilliantly. Contrast and clarity. 

Gray and blue often mingle on my lunch-time walks in downtown Albany, where buildings frame the sky, and bricks balance the clouds. 

Beauty doesn’t always strike in bold and brilliant strokes – sometimes it’s softer, found in the basic purity of a blue sky, or the simple quiet of an afternoon’s stillness. You have to listen carefully to find it then, you have to look a little closer, but it’s there, in the subtle mottling of a wall of bricks, in the winks of a series of windows, blinking back at the astute observer. 

October 26, 2019 marked the very last day I had a drink of alcohol. 

This morning marks three years of sober living. 

And when I look back and consider all the crazy shit that’s gone down in the world during that time, not drinking was a pretty big fucking deal. 

Luckily, I didn’t see it as such in the very beginning, or I might not have stopped. During those first few days of not drinking, it was all I could manage to locate myself in a day. Who was I without a martini glass in my hand and a bolt of harsh truth on my tongue? Who was I without simultaneously charming and offending dinner guests from soup to nuts, or in my case from pre-dinner cocktail to greeting cocktail, to dinner wine, to after-dinner cocktail? Who was I without a pre-gaming drink to quell the nerves and calm the social jitters? 

When that kind of existential crisis hits, not drinking happily felt like something of a cake walk. When I thought of the reasons I drank, it was mostly to calm and quiet my social anxiety, something I had only recently discovered around that time. Such a discovery was at the heart of how I could simply stop drinking one day, and be entirely ok with it. The second I was aware of why it was happening was the second I didn’t feel the need to do it anymore. It didn’t take away the social anxiety, but it stopped drinking from being the crutch I used to deal with it. Then the real work began – the therapy, the reading, the meditation, the examination – and the redrawing and re-envisioning of my life. Not drinking was a part of that, but it was secondary to the main part of learning to be a better, healthier person. 

I thought those early days would be fraught with the panic of not having a drink on hand for when I felt nervous or anxious or simply frazzled by life, and I wondered at how I might function without having my usual friend out there. The world is tough enough – it’s not getting any easier – and even on the best days only an idiot would think things are all ok. And while not drinking itself proved to be rather simple, it was everything else that left me challenged and terrified. For so many years, the support of a drink had been what got me through every difficult situation. It was a universal band-aid that covered and protected my heart and head from a multitude of injuries and pain and, above all, worry.

Without alcohol, I would have to deal with all of those things head-on for the first time – and with a clear mind and no excuses. That was the scary part. That was the part everyone wanted to hear about because it can be torturous to turn your regular life upside down. People love that kind of drama, and for a while I kept that part quiet, tamping it down when I explained how and why I stopped drinking, but after three years I feel even less afraid, and maybe it will help someone else to hear that it was frightening at first, but ultimately rewarding. 

Once I learned to give in to the honesty and the fear, to let it out in therapy and to close friends and family whom I knew wouldn’t judge me, I could begin to tackle the origins of a lifetime of feeling like I needed a cocktail in my hand. For someone whose image has a life of its own – an image that has protected and ruined me in equal parts – drinking was inexorably bound to my perception of myself, even as I knew it shouldn’t have been. Even if I knew it wasn’t totally true. I played it up so much that it started to take hold, and maybe I caught it just before it was about to come into existence. The question of whether I was a full-fledged alcoholic is a tricky one – and I have genuinely been on both sides of it through the years. 

Today, that question is moot. 

I’m comfortable with saying I was an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I wasn’t an alcoholic.

I’m comfortable with saying I genuinely don’t know if I was or am an alcoholic, because the bottom line is that you don’t have to be an alcoholic to be sober. You don’t have to be addicted to alcohol to live a life of sobriety. You don’t have to explain why you don’t drink any more than you have to explain why you don’t like Brussel sprouts or the color magenta. Once I took out that socially-induced need to label and act accordingly, it became a question of choice – and the over-riding theme of my life, of the person I most want to be, has been making choices that are not always socially-sanctioned or common, but have always turned out right for me. This was just another of those decisions, made in defiance of what anyone else thought or assumed. 

And so I begin another day of not drinking. It may lead to another week of not drinking, then another month of not drinking, and then a whole season, and then another whole year. 

Three years ago tonight I had my last cocktail (sober anniversary post to come tomorrow). That last cocktail had been several months, perhaps years, in the making, and while I knew it would eventually arrive, I just wasn’t exactly sure when. My mind and my body had been whispering for some time that it was enough, that they weren’t getting the protection and joy they once did from alcohol, that they couldn’t properly defeat the demons with liquor getting in the way. In my head, I understood all of that. It made sense and sounded like reason, but fear has a way of overriding sense and reason, and back then I was simply too afraid to go out there alone, without a cocktail.  

It wasn’t that last night of drinking that did it. It wasn’t that last hangover. It was the culmination of all the hangovers that had come before, in the stark light of the next day. At those times I would be filled with the dread and depression of having flushed my body with alcohol, of altering my brain and bending my perception to the point where I didn’t remember things or know what I was saying. The cumulative effect of those mornings eventually clicked over to being something I didn’t want to do anymore. I’d had enough. 

Those hangover mornings felt haunted. The quiet felt more quiet, the gray light felt more gray. The world took on a somber aspect, and I always felt more alone than ever. It makes sense when one considers the basic fact that alcohol is a depressant. I remember on one such day sitting at a cafe and watching people walk by, wishing I could have been more like them, wishing I didn’t have to get drunk the night before to handle whatever social situation was worrying me. Everyone else seemed to go through the day so much easier than me. I didn’t realize how much drinking played a part in those thoughts, how it all fed into a slow, downward slope whose ending I dreaded as much as I wanted to watch it play out. 

Was I having fun on the night of October 26, 2019? A little. Not very much though, if I’m being completely honest. Drinking had ceased being fun for a while, and it was verging on simply being a habit. It was time…

Standing half-naked in the sunlight, I still manage to cover the decades-old bruises left on my heart. Back in the 90’s, I remember listening to Trent Reznor scream, “I wanna fuck you like an animal!” and it was all just a way of getting ‘Closer’ to God. On this particular Sunday morning, God feels far away, so I put on a piece by Reznor and Atticus Ross that was produced over a decade after ‘Closer’. What a difference a decade makes, and now almost another decade has passed beyond that. Still, I stand at the window from time to time, soaking in the sun to feel some sort of warmth in this wayward world, decade after decade after decade. I feel the subtle shift of time. I feel the differences in the years, knowing much of that is simple shifts in perspective and perception. Getting closer to peace within, even as the world grows ever divisive without. 

I like this music. It’s calm and tense at once, the way most of us are living each day out. Even at our most peaceful moments, the tension of a country teetering on the brink of collapse does’t fully allow for total release and meditative bliss. All I can do is approach… gently, slowly, in each and every breath. It’s a lovely reminder that life is never fully done, and nothing is ever truly complete. It’s all one continuously flowing stream – we dip in and out of a day, we dip in and out of a lifetime. We do our best, even when it’s all falling down around us, and when I try to sort it out in words, as in this very post, it crumbles in my incapable hands. 

Working to embrace the imperfect aspects of life, I strive to make my peace with such failures. I tell myself I’m ok with it, even though it still bothers and worries me. Putting it down here, literally and figuratively, helps a little. I put it down in writing, and then I put it down in my head. The power of acknowledgement is one of those hidden secrets of life that no one ever tells you about – at least no one told me. I only knew the power of writing – of putting thoughts to print or paper – and in a way that was its own acknowledgment. The demon is always less frightening when it can be named, then trapped on a piece of paper or in the confines of a soon-to-be-buried blog post. 

Hurrying toward Halloween, which arrives exactly one week from today, this recap is bracketed by these baby pumpkins, which have their own tales to tell – the growth of a pumpkin, no matter how small and adorable, is not without its harrowing moments. Who knows what summer stories they have which got them to this sad denouement? On with the weekly recap…

The week began amid candlelight and Shirley Horn. 

A meditative walk in the woods.

The Ben Cohen calendar signals the most wonderful time of the year is coming quickly upon us.

A sexual inspiration for the ears.

30 years of ‘Sex’ and ‘Erotica’ intertwined with death.

Andy celebrated a birthday in his preferred quiet way.

A fall pause.

Hidden hope right in the backyard.

Ornamental orthodoxy.

The view from the attic.

An Albany afternoon.

Dazzlers of the Day included Richard Marx, Mufseen Miah, and David Bagnardi.

The view looks over a bit of the neighborhood, especially in winter once the leaves have gone. From the safe vantage point of our attic, lit with candles and fragrant with their spicy traces of cardamom, cinnamon, and orange peel, the view lended to the coziness – the world from a single vantage point. A section of foliage lit in fall flames against a blue sky and framed by the branches of an old pine tree, cradled as a view within a view. 

Fall is about such layers, in what we wear, in the way the trees shake off their summer finery in stages, in the gradations of light from the window and the candles. The attic is quiet. It’s where I go to pause and think, to prepare for the coming winter and reconcile myself to the gray days on the way. There is a certain peace here, safely ensconced slightly above the lay of the land, protected and buoyed by its lofty nature. Meanwhile the outside world burns up before a bright blue sky…

Ornamental kales and cabbages are my favorite kind of cabbages and kales. (Though I’m coming around the common cooking cabbage when employed like this.) For fantastic fall color, these ornamental varieties offer some fabulous hues, accentuated by drops of rain from the previous evening – a lovely reminder of all the wonder of fall, and a recompense for the loss of summer. Fall still burns, fall still smolders. 

Fall packs its own punch, casting its own spells – sometimes with color, sometimes with scents, sometimes with the lightest wisp of smoke on a breeze. In the case of fall and cabbage, it takes a lackluster and utilitarian green, and turns it into this spectacular visage. Vibrant and vivacious – power of the ‘V’.