Yesterday I finished reading Susan Cheever's Note Found in a Bottle. She's the daughter of John Cheever, a writer who, during his heyday in the mid forties through late sixties, was fairly famous, penning a ton of fiction, including a few dozen vignettes for the New Yorker.

Susan, like her father, wound up being a drunk. It took her fifty years to realize it.

She had a mess of a life. To hear her tell it, along with the mess existed a great deal of beauty and exploration. But the last fifteen years or so before sobriety, the messes accumulated. She went through the men faster, became sloppier. The costs of drinking mounted, and she could not instinctively figure out why.

I thought: you are lucky you were the daughter of a well known writer. if you weren't cheever's daughter, you would have been a stripper with a good mind. A stripper with a screenplay who went nowhere.

During long stretches of her life I wondered where the money was coming from. She made some from her books but not enough to fund the lifestyle. And I realized: It's Daddy's help. Cheever wound up rich. Susan alludes to this at times. Daddy bought her a car. Daddy paid the rent. Eventually she makes it but without this source of money to support her through the bleak years, she would have been another woman in America who wanted to be a writer but failed.

I kept waiting for the epiphanies behind her quitting. She saw what drinking did to her father, to her home life. I started to wonder, she writes, if the thing that bound the family together, the afternoon champagne followed by evening highballs and scotch after dinner, the constant soaking of us all, had anything to do with our relationships with others, and the vortex of chaos that always seemed to be at the center. I'm paraphrasing her words, but the intent is the same. She started to flip causality. Instead of I drink because I have problems, she thought: I have problems because I drink.

She noticed that people who didn't drink interpreted the world differently.

I think the kicker for her was when she realized that her own father had changed. When he was sober for six years – he stopped just shy of seventy – when Susan saw him he was calmer. He didn't complain as much. He was more accepting of life, which no longer appeared to be a series of affronts to take personally.

And although I agree with and respect these epiphanies of Susan's, my dominant thought was more along the lines of, you know, what took you so fucking long to connect the dots?

But then I looked at my own life and saw the same thing. And it took me nearly as long. I knew even in my early thirties that I needed to stop. It took me until forty to finally do it. About ten years earlier in my life than it took Susan.

I still sip. I had two shots of gin on Thursday. I hid this from Penny. I wondered if she'll figure it out. I replaced the gin in the bottle in the living room with cheap nips but i can't replace the seal on the bottle, now broken. It probably doesn't matter.

I had off from work. I took a vacation day to help compensate me for all of the unpaid overtime I put in over the last year. I will take more as the months go by.

I thought I would write more. Instead I weeded the front yard.

I am no gardener. I work on computer systems all day most days. My hands are soft. But my lawnmower guy cancelled and it has been coming up tall so I finally decided, fuck it, I will take care of it all. I will mow and I will weed and I will get mulch at home depot and lift large bags of wood chips into my car and then again out, I will break plastic bags full of the stuff and pour the black chips out over the freshly weeded soil and rake it all together, I will blast my driveway with water to clear the residue of dirt and grass and roots, I will bake in the hot sun until the sweat pours off of me and I feel lightheaded, I will let the neighbors see it all and I will not care.

I did all of these things. I mowed the front and carried the mulch to the backyard's compost pile in a blue plastic wading pool that a neighbor gave me.

Then I walked my dog and thought about how drunk I was ten years ago.

Not even. Eight. I wasn't a drunk but I drank a lot. Not every day. But enough. It was hard for me to take a day or two off. I tried and most weeks succeeded. Then there'd be the four or five days I failed, days and evenings full of an assortment of alcohol, beer and vodka and gin. I drank because I thought it made me feel good – and it does sometimes, which is why we all start. The feeling is real. But then that feeling gets bad and sour and we try to fix it by drinking more, which also works, but only temporarily – and the windows in which we feel good shut more and more until they close entirely and all we are left with is the staleness and fermenting sweetness of ourselves, the stink from the leavings gone bad.

I showered. I tried to fix a problem related to health care reimbursement of a dental charge made against my FSA and lamented how much paperwork the world expects me to do. I shut my eyes for thirty minutes and fell into a light sleep, then woke up, finished mowing my lawn, and decided to read Cheever.

Before I knew it Penny was home, I was cooking steak and broccoli and cauliflower with alfredo sauce, listening to her tell me about her day.

By the time we were on the couch watching bodkin on Netflix, I was thinking about about how glad I am that neither of us are drunks.