In response to a friend's quiestion of what not drinking was like...

As far as not drinking it came upon me suddenly. I had been down in Naples FL visiting an old friend a few blocks from the Gulf coast. The sun doesn't set in Naples until a hundred people are drinking on the beach. So I, being my mother's son, bought a box of wine; though not her preferred brand. A box of Pinot Noir is 4 bottles worth of wine and only costs about $12. Drinking from the space bag for a few days led me to the discovery that it was horrid wine. I even had to buy beer a few times to alleviate the destruction of my stomach lining; but I persevered and even kept it in the vestibule of the tent I was sleeping in in the backyard so that I would have to face my nemesis first thing in the morning.
The flight back I spent in my journal. In my deepest sense of self there dwells a story maker and teller. As I wrote I sipped whiskys which brightened the noonday sun, but dimmed my head. The sentences weren't coming out smooth like a sunbeam's moment through a moving cloudhole, they were coughing out like a coal train's smokestack. The bender had crested the 14 month wave and was beginning the curl that will lead to a collapsing in on itself. The spree was no longer a story to tell but a rut chunnelling me through each day.
This, box of wine and all, has recently revealed itself to be a genius plot in the disguise of an alky's soulrot. I didn't crystallize any of this into wordable emotional categories until I woke up back in the hills the next day. I was in a low state of revulsion towards the effects of the beach alcohol (beach alcohol, in the winter, is much saltier and even more dehydrating than even altitude alcohol) inside my body. The sluggish character it was festering into as I continued to feed the monster; 4, 5, 8, 12 drinks a day, more, more, was seeping out of the heels of my feet and I walked through the day with a squish and wet squeaks.
So as I squished over to the fridge of bestowing that first evening of February, I found this giant sentry carved from the stone of my deep will. My desirous, sluggish, cravenly thirst - so diffuse in its methods, so scattered in its doings - has no chance of direct confrontation with such a condensed form of my's elves.
"It seems," I said "that there has been a vote within me and most of the energies of feeling have sided with this formidable intent to uncrave the numb of alcohol."
It mostly turned off, like a switch. I am treating myself to things like candlelit piano music warming the air around a mustard bath (its a bath salts mix of mustard and other herbs that open up the pores of the skin so that nastiness like alcohol residues can be released) and then a dark room and complete relaxation in the Mindfold.