Jim Leftwich, Blackout Drinking and The Suicide Notes

Blackout Drinking and The Suicide Notes

Alcohol is a dangerous drug. As far as my personal experience is concerned, it is the most dangerous drug I have ever encountered.

I started drinking on the job almost as soon as I started working. I was arrested for Driving Under the Influence 3 times in a period of 10 years. I lost count of how many times, almost all of them in the early-to mid-80s, a couple in the late 70s, that I was picked up and held overnight for being drunk in public. Maybe a dozen times, I'm not sure.

I remember my first cross country trip, taken in the spring of 1978 with some high school friends. I remember driving a hundred miles an hour through the New Mexico desert, very drunk. When we stopped for gas, I got out and fell onto the parking lot. There was a photograph of me from that trip, sitting in the backseat of the car, wearing a straw hat, with a bottle of whiskey in each hand, yelling at the camera.

About 10 years ago I started working on a Selected Early Poems, a compilation of works written between 1972 and 1991. The working title was Blackout Drinking and The Suicide Notes. I threw away all of my paper copies of the poems a couple of years ago. Last week I deleted the pdf of the abandoned work-in-progress.

I drank excessively for 20 years, 1971 to 1991. During the last 9 of those years, I consulted with numerous counselors in a variety of settings. All of them were AA/12-step based, and none of them worked for me. Finally, in the fall of 1991, a counselor told me about the cognitive model of addiction. It worked. I had to put a lot of work into it, but it worked.

I stayed away from alcohol for 7 years. Then, at the perfect midlife age of 42, in 1998, I decided I wanted to drink some more. And I did. Every day for almost exactly 2 years. When I decided I had had enough, I quit. No counselors, no days and weeks and months and years of struggling and miserably failing, I just decided to quit, and did so. The cognitive model of addiction worked for me, once I knew how to use it.

I have been alcohol-free for 21 consecutive years, and for 28 of the last 30 years. It might seem like I would be over and done with all of that by now. It should feel like a significant achievement, and most of the time it does, but every now and then something happens to remind me of my drinking days. It doesn't take much. Alcohol is a very dangerous drug. I don't want to ever forget that.

08.16.2021