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100facesof.me

Day 52 of 100

Black-and-white close-up of a bearded man in a snapback cap reading 'RUN', smirking slightly at the camera in a black t-shirt.
Day 52 / 100 Weight 355.2 Proud of my dog Sony A7R5 16mm f/5.6 1/30 ISO1000

“Nah, I just want to go back to the hotel.”

My birthday is in late September. Growing up my parents never had much so my birthdays would be modest and simple. I knew we didn’t have a lot and always felt bad asking my parents for presents or inviting a lot of people, so I learned to devalue my birthday.

But this year was different. It was 2018 I was working for Amazon and had moved to Seattle. Why? I was commuting to Seattle from SF 3 days a week for a year and it just got to the point when I would fly into Seattle I would be happy and SF lost that feeling for me.

I decided that I wanted to celebrate my birthday in a unique way. My friend Mike was putting on a private wagyu tasting dinner in LA with a local chef at some hot restaurant with meat flown in from Japan. I bought two seats and asked my friend Aaron to come along since he knew a lot more about Japanese culture and food, and frankly, we always had a good time just hanging out.

I flew down to LA and found some cool hipster hotel to stay in. I decided if I was going to splurge on my birthday, I would go all out and stay at hot spots, eat at hot spots, and generally enjoy myself, so I chose the SLS in Beverly Hills which I had once left a bullet that was used in the Valentine’s Day Massacre in one of the rooms. That was an interesting phone call to the front desk.

We went to dinner and it was awesome. Like 10 platings of meat served and prepared in different ways each better than the last. We would get a lesson on the wagyu and words like Snow and Olive were thrown around. I mostly just enjoyed it, and somewhere in the middle of the dinner we ordered a flight of Japanese whisky for each of us. It’s like 5 small glasses of whiskey which like the meat was explained to us and each was better than the last.

As dinner ended, I started asking Aaron and others to go out after. Everyone said no. Everyone had work or responsibilities the next day. I started listing out all the bad decisions I could make and engaged in an internal argument around doing bad things or going back to the hotel.

In the middle of that argument, I realized that I had no power over the first drink. That one drink kicked off in me a desire to keep chasing badly until I ended up in a worst spot. There was something wrong with my relationship with alcohol (and frankly weed too).

Right there, standing on the streets of LA I knew it was time for me to get help, and September 19, 2018 was the last day I had a drink or smoked weed. I had decided that for me a life of sobriety was my future.