Stirring Tales of Withdrawal

I felt, folks, that as a beneficent fiat to the public, it was just about time somebody put out a good, reliable guide to dealing with alcohol withdrawal after a solid six months straight of binge drinking, just in case anyone was sorely in need. Further, as a gesture of my renowned magnanimity, I have decided that the person delivering these words of wisdom ought to be none other than your own humble narrator. Ready?

User’s Guide to Seven-Day Self-Detoxification.

1) Learn to enjoy sleep deprivation. You won’t be seeing Mr. Sandman for several days, and if you try, he’ll just send you semi-somnolescent nightmares that will make you sorry you did. (Eaten alive by wild dogs, stuff like that.) Unless you have a valium prescription, which you’d have combined with alcohol by now if you had, you should just accept this and try to cope productively. Lying in bed feverish, sweating and frustrated is really no way to spend the night. Take the odd hour nap when you must throughout the day, but for chrissake do something productive during the forlorn, restless hours of darkness. One of the few things worse than not sleeping is lying in bed bored and pissed off because you can’t sleep. Give up. Your body will sleep sober when it’s ready, in 72-96 hours minimum. The good news is, there’s absolutely not a goddamn thing else to do at four a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Everyone sober is asleep and everyone drunk will annoy the piss out of your surly, fiending self the moment you hear their slurry, jocund voices. Try ironing, or reading, and those other things that people who don’t spend their lives rotting their livers on low-rent draft beer in a shithole dive bar with Brad Paisley on the jukebox.
2) Take diarrhea, stomach cramps, headaches, shaking and irritability as a badge of honor. You were obviously on a prodigious and ultimately successful bender for it to proceed for so long. Accept your suffering with the knowledge that you must have felt awfully nice for an awfully long time to feel this bad now. Besides, what’s the sense in whining? It’s about as appealing to others as those freaks missing jaws from decades of chew making documentary videos to inspire fear and pity in grammar school children. You did the crime, now do the time. No one wants to hear you complain. Deep down, you don’t even want to hear it yourself. Like anyone on death row, you have a pretty good inclination why you’re where you are right now.
3) Don’t answer the phone or the door. You will power stands at this point like a Japanese pagoda before a hurricane. The merest suggestion from another person that you go out drinking will have you in their living room before they can close the flip phone. Possibly before they even finish the invitation. After about five days, when the (at least presently) silky voices of PBR and Smirnoff begin to subside, you may exchange pleasantries with elderly family members and MySpace friends on the other side of the country. Until then, bolt the door and drink plenty of water.
4) Under no circumstances consider smoking marijuana to alleviate your suffering. Withdrawal brings a Keouac-y, Hemmingwayish sense of sleazy literary merit. Pot just makes you high and annoying. Additionally, if there’s anything sorrier than a person groveling with booze-lust, it’s a stoned person with flecks of Little Debbie about the maw, trying to avoid looking like they’re groveling with booze-lust.
5) Drink lots of caffeine. That way you can claim that your hands won’t stay steady because of the caffeine, which is true. There is no need to mention that they would not have done so in any case. As a corollary, do not consume chamomile, melatonin, kava-kava, valerian, or any other herbal crackpottery aimed at inducing calm or sleep. It won’t work and then you’ll be back at the angry-at-the-pillow stage of things. See (1).
6) Realize that you have a problem. Your problem is that you live in a world so pathetically backward that: A) You are forced to assiduously consume alcohol to supplement its inherent inadequacies; B) Science is so miserably primitive that it cannot synthesize a non-addictive variant of ethanol; and C) There is a host of preachy moralists out there that have to sit in church basements chain smoking and eating Dunkin’ Donut holes thinking that they know something that you don’t. Find them, when you are allowed out, and kill them.