This is a thread for ILXors ON THE WAGON (and for the Wagon Curious)

One of my good friends wound up in rehab this time last year after spiralling following the death of a friend who he listened to od and die while on the phone w/ him. He is in AA and has almost a year sober now. Talking to him about it has been very interesting. I might go to some al-anon meetings for adult children of alcoholics. Could be interesting, I think.

Jimbeaux - that's very interesting. I remember years ago I couldn't imagine not smoking because I just identified as a smoker. I guess sort of similar.

And so a thread about sobriety turns into a discussion of the merits of various brands of edibles LOL

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

i mean, "california sober" is a thing, although we call it "oregon sober" here because, uh, we're oregon. also known as "west coast sober".

xxp My mom has been involved with an organization for adult children of alcoholics for years, she's found it very helpful.

I've heard very good things from several people. Will report back if I wind up going.

"I couldn't imagine not smoking because I just identified as a smoker."

i really had to learn to mourn my smoking. like it was the loss of a person. just to deal with the emptiness and grief. it was really rough. but i think dealing with it as something that was...dead?...somehow made it easier over time.

I love bars but have to stop drinking. My strategy is to pivot to non alcoholic beers. Tried this successfully on Monday. Half the price and I stayed half as long. And of course was able to go home lucid and present.

maria likes to try the non-alc beers when we go out or in stores. there are more and more good ones all the time. she's also into kombucha and hops drinks. i am not really. and non-alc beer just makes me want a beer.

Have been drinking NA beers for a while and not sure it’s a great idea. I know many in recovery warn against it; it makes a lot of ppl crave the real thing as Scott says. Tread carefully!

i heard a comedian, maybe neal brennan? talk abt non alcoholic beer
a friend in recovery had suggested he avoid it & he was like, “here’s how i know i’m ok: because if l drink three of these i don’t immediately need to go out score some coke. i think i’m ok with these.”

my youngest sibling is a big booster of ACA and AA culture in general... mind you there's no pope of AA so there's wide variance between individual groups. they've really gotten more involved with this queer aa group lately, and i'm super happy for them.

anyway, they've recommended ACA to me as well... i looked into connecting with an ACA group but my mental health condition at the time was not super conducive to that sort of thing. maybe once my DBT program is done i'll look into it again. ACA seems like a pretty interesting org... a lot more and more these days you start thinking that maybe it's not the substance itself that's the problem. like, with me, i qualify because my dad was an alcoholic, but he quit drinking before i was born. he was a shitty dad, but most of the trauma and abuse i went through i got from my mom, whose only addiction is cigarettes.

and there's varying sorts of groups... zoom, in-person, people who are strict about parents being alcoholics and people who are like, oh, your parents were shitty even though they weren't alcoholics? come on in!. and then you have groups like the LGBTQ+ exclusive groups and the one that's all about entheogen-focused recovery. which sounds weird until you realize that bill w was a really strong supporter of timothy leary towards the end of bill w's life. not my thing, personally.

---

the thing about addiction... whatever it is... to me, i feel like people focus in too much on the substance and not on the larger patterns

i used to really want to do all kinds of drugs. the main reason i didn't was because i was poor and didn't know anybody i could score drugs from. (i didn't get out much.) then i started estrogen, and i have this whole schtick where i talk about how estrogen is the best drug ever, i feel better than i ever have in my life, i love everyone, i have more energy _and_ am more relaxed at the same time, the high lasts for a week, and the only side effect is that i grew really nice tits.

i mean i guess E is just as much a drug as T is. it's more than just the drug, though, isn't it? drugs are a coping mechanism, and whether or not you're likely to do drugs has a lot to do with how much it is you need to cope with.

it still gets portrayed as an individual failing, though, and it fucking drives me crazy. with me, it's food. i know how to eat a healthy diet. my mom was a dietician. she also used food as a substitute for love. combine that with my body image issues...

and i get blamed personally because plenty of _other_ people have no problems maintaining a healthy weight and being physically active. so obviously _i'm_ the problem. and this drives me nuts because i'm a fucking data analyst, like, run the numbers, see if there's a fucking _pattern_ when it comes to obesity. you think, what, americans are obese because we're lazy, gluttonous pigs? you think maybe it has something to do with the constant insecurity we experience, with the lack of a social safety net, the sort of thing that leads you to eat when you can as much as you can, no matter whether you're hungry, because you don't know when you'll be able to eat again? i mean this is simple fucking shit, to me, but people have trouble wrapping their heads around it.

with me it's not so much that i'm food-insecure... it's just the only need i had that ever got fulfilled, so somatically, all of my needs manifest as hunger. if i eat when i'm hungry, i'm going to be obese. i have, of course, discovered that if i don't eat when i'm hungry, eventually i stop being hungry. also, i stop having the energy to get out of bed. my most successful diets were the "i'm too depressed to eat" diets. hell, i lost about 20 pounds over three months earlier this year from it. could've lost more if i'd burned more calories by, say, getting out of bed.

a lot of these diets, i know what they are, they're a way of tricking your brain, because my brain sometimes gets weird ideas about what food i need and how much i need that... aren't totally congruent with FDA recommendations. like i went gluten-free a few months back. i don't think i'm gluten-intolerant. my entire diet was just made up of gluten and i wound up feeling like shit every time i ate gluten. for whatever reason not eating gluten seems to help, so i'm going with it. i mean, there are probably other things that would help more, but those things are mostly out of my control. feeling like i have _control_ over my eating, that i'm not a contemptible, lazy glutton, that's also, you know, that's really helpful too. come to think of it.

my mom was a dietician.

and despite that i still regularly misspell dietitian, smdh

Calstars, I am a musician (of sorts) and therefore I frequently spend four or five hours in a bar with my best friends, once or twice a week. That is tough to do while being completely abstinent.

That said, I do like a lot of NA beers, especially the Athletic ones. NA Heineken is basically indistinguishable from Heineken. My other go-to is Ritual Gin Alternative. Spicy and good.

Athletic is what I was drinking on Monday, the golden ale and the 'IPA.' I think the GA was a little bit better. Would have NA Heineken in a heartbeat.

i miss wine...wine is so good.

Calstars, Upside Dawn?

That’s the one

i heard a comedian, maybe neal brennan? talk abt non alcoholic beer

A comedian friend of a friend of mine, years ago, at an open mic, had a funny bit about replacing beer with non-alcoholic beer, and it, too, becoming a habit. The punchline was something like, "my name is (redacted), and I am a non-alcoholic."

I have a friend now who readily concedes an addictive personality. He apparently used to drink, though I never saw him drink, and eventually went to AA for smoking pot, though I never saw him smoke. Lately he's been fishing a lot, and he admits that even that has started to become a problem.

I had one of those Revive kombuchas a couple of years ago and it kinda tasted like beer

I would probably drink more of the "hop water" type drinks, but they are so damn expensive for what they are - water with hop flavoring, so not even a NA beer. That must be extremely cheap to make (no malt, no grains), but they still go for $10/6-pack.

I sampled one that was called Hop Water years ago and thought it was pretty good, but it sold for the same price as actual craft beer.

I stopped drinking alcohol completely during the pandemic, but marking the end of the working day with a non-alcoholic beer is a really important element of winding down for the evening.

"Lately he's been fishing a lot, and he admits that even that has started to become a problem."

i don't play video games but years back i thought maybe it would relax me and take my mind off things so i found one that i liked and i played it for an equivalent of months, made maria hate the sight of it, got tennis elbow, and became 8th in the world on Playstation.

Alcohol was never more than a means to an end for me, non-alcoholic booze just seems like the worst of all worlds. Unpleasant taste and I don't become more sociable? Sign me up.

If the NA equivalent of tobacco existed, though, I'd be in. Standing outside the bar smoking with the other remaining reprobates, now that's a pleasant time.

i don't play video games but years back i thought maybe it would relax me and take my mind off things so i found one that i liked and i played it for an equivalent of months, made maria hate the sight of it, got tennis elbow, and became 8th in the world on Playstation.

― scott seward

i got addicted to one of the match 3 games, i've had to quit it cold turkey a couple of times now. never spent a dime on it... something about a box that flashes pretty colored lights at me and tells me i'm a winner in response to my performing trivial actions, god, i could do that all day and night

so in unrelated news it turns out that i have pretty low self-esteem

If the NA equivalent of tobacco existed, though, I'd be in. Standing outside the bar smoking with the other remaining reprobates, now that's a pleasant time.

― papal hotwife (milo z)

i've had ex-smokers tell me that the NA equivalent of smoking is like literally breathing, that a lot of the reason smoking cigarettes feels good is because it requires you to breathe mindfully

i've never smoked tobacco but breathing mindfully _does_ feel good. that should be a habit, replace "smoke breaks" with just being able to step outside for ten minutes to breathe mindfully with other people. but it isn't, because we live in a dystopia.

Non-alcoholic beer definitely helps for me. There's a ritualistic aspect to my drinking, I get home after a day's work and sitting down with a drink is a signal that the working day is over. Having a NA beer kind of helps with that.

If the NA equivalent of tobacco existed

there are all kinds of herbal 'smoke mixes' out there, but it's probably just like smoking a campfire or something, likely not very satisfying

Smoking for me was the whole ritualistic aspect beyond either the communal or solo time-out aspect - packing the pack, flipping around a lucky one, gotta find my lighter, no lighter, oh hey man you got a lighter I can borrow, people bumming, pointing with a cigarette in your hand.

Too bad about the whole waking up feeling like an elephant sat on my chest and shit down my throat aspect (and cancer/etc.).

When I was 18 the head shop sold catnip cigarettes (I think they were supposed to get you 'high' but we just thought it was a funny thing). 12 hour headache city.

Non-alcoholic beer definitely helps for me. There's a ritualistic aspect to my drinking, I get home after a day's work and sitting down with a drink is a signal that the working day is over. Having a NA beer kind of helps with that.

Same here. I don't drink very much anyway - but I had to cut down on drinking after a concussion (which I got while sober!).

After a while, the rush of pulling a cold beer of the fridge after work was the same for me, whether it was alcholic or not, so I started sticking to non-alcoholic more often.

I quit cigarette smoking cold turkey in early 2006 and never really looked back, not interested anymore at all

Occasionally will hit the spliff (weed & norwegian shag) at band practice, that's about it

I do have an old pipe that I used to like to take on camping trips a few years ago, but I haven't even seen pipe tobacco in drug stores in several years and I don't care enough to go to an actual tobacconist

if you guys start talking about how wonderful smoking is i might have to skedaddle!

catnip cig talk is fine by me though. when was the last time someone had a clove cigarette?

i could never smoke cigars because i couldn't stop myself from inhaling.

i knew i had to go the edible route with weed after i quit smoking. too much nostalgia for tobacco.

vaping just made me want the real thing too.

big fan of breathing mindfully here. breathing is how we access god imho. did you know the most efficient way to deliver oxygen to your bloodstream is to breathe through your nose? i want to tell everyone about all of this but no one gives a fuck lmao. maybe i'm turning into a pseudo-spiritual crank but no i don't go to church and never will thank you very much.

re smoking, i'm romantically involved with someone who's abroad for a few weeks. he's been smoking cigs in video chats (do as the locals do). thank god it's been over 4 years since i had my last cig. i have literally no cravings now. i don't bat an eye watching him. i just feel a little concerned. the real reason i finally quit smoking was because i wasn't getting enough oxygen. big cause of me feeling depressed. i had asthma as a kid. things you learn or suspect that aren't in the dsm.

My weed intake was already significant but went up when I stopped drinking. I stopped drinking cuz I was trying to find what was triggering my migraines, and that is apparently one of them. They only started after having Covid. Weird.

I don’t really enjoy NA beer but I bet if I looked hard enough I’d find one I liked. I just drink a 12 of seltzer every two days. Sometimes I like a tart lemonade.

In terms of taste, NA beers have improved massively over the past few years.

I have never successfully smoked a cigarette or cigar. Just can't fricking do it.

Pipe tobacco was a moderately fun affectation when I was an English major on the East Coast wearing a tweed sportcoat with elbow patches. (Not even kidding here, I literally did precisely those things. Walking cliché, 1992 me.)

Even for weed I prefer edibles.

cigs never did much for me, thank god. make me cough a lot too and it's hard to get the smell out of your clothes. but I love the ritual of smoking, or at least taking a break from a noisy, busy atmosphere to chill outside for a few minutes and have more intimate conversations. eventually I realized it ain't that weird to go outside to hang out and just not smoke.

I mean in general I guess I'm lucky I didn't have that addiction gene. or maybe I do but it's not as strong as some others have it. in my early 20's pretty much everyone I knew drank a ton, smoked cigs and weed. which eventually led to harder drugs, up until one guy discovered this thing called "fentanyl" and promptly overdosed on it. he also happened to be the plug for a lot of us so most of the group just had to quit cold turkey. not that getting high was all that fun anymore when one of your best friends dies. some people struggled really hard with it and came out the other hand as totally different people, for better or worse (I mean, obviously it's "for better", but a couple of them just won't have anything to do with anyone else in that group anymore, which is sad). and then for some of us it was just like, eh, whatever. I like weed because you're still present, you can still do stuff and you still feel pain and all that, it just bothers you much less. the Percs I was taking just papered over everything. it was nice but you felt like you lost control of yourself somewhat and I didn't like that feeling.

It has suddenly occurred to me that I could likely make my own hop water pretty easily. I used to make beer so I have all the equipment, just boil some water, add hops, let cool, and bottle. I may even have some 20-30 year old hop pellets around.

when was the last time someone had a clove cigarette?

Lol as I was reading through this and M mentioned the catnip cigs I thought of cloves. When I was a freshman in college going to the smoke shop and buying cloves felt so cool. Leave me alone, I was 17. ;) There were so many rumors around them too. Do they actually cut your lungs? Who knows! They did taste amazing. That I remember.

Get a free vial of patchouli oil with every purchase of cloves

and some incense.

there seems to be something of an arms race happening here - every can at the bodega is a double-blasted IPA clocking in at close to 10% ABV, i think there's one at like 13-14%. i think of them as new 40s.

I feel your pain, brother. There are exactly two non-double IPA cans I can buy at the bodegas, Lagunitas and Deschutes Fresh Squeezed, everything else is 8% or more. And forget about a 19.2 lager or pilsner! So not gonna happen.

clove cigarettes are mostly tobacco anyway, they don't really count as a substitute

This is a thread for ILXors OFF THE WAGON (and for the Off the Wagon Curious)

^does this deserve its own thread or should I just use it as a subtitle in next year’s at the bar thread

Lol I was never suggesting cloves as a tobacco alternative just to be clear.

could never get cloves here, but I was in NYC for my 26th birthday and met a girl on the way back from a club in alphabet city who gave me a box of Djarums and I thought they were fucking delicious. I bought a packet of some other brand and they were awful though, it was just that brand I liked maybe