Free Booze Is Everywhere When You're Detoxing

If you didn't know already, I've embarked upon a personal health journey as prescribed in the book Strength For Life, by Shawn Phillips. I'm not trying to lose weight or gain weight -- I'm just trying to jump start healthy discipline.

A week into the "base camp" section of our training program -- which amounts to a two-week detox with occasional light workouts involving pushups, squats and crunches -- I was riding the F train back to Brooklyn after watching some friends in a comedy show. It was one in the morning. I was wide awake. Full of energy. Mind ready to race.

It's terrible. Gone are the days of lazily stumbling onto a train, reminiscing about the last three fancy-pants beers I drank, chatting in occasional slurred words and too-loud laughs with fellow evening warriors.

What's worse is that during the first week of a detox in which I wasn't consuming bread, fatty foods, refined sugar, dairy or alcohol, I was invited to no fewer than four events that offered free booze. Four! Can you believe that? I don't know if you've been watching the news, but oil prices are skyrocketing! The Midwest is underwater! Food prices, thanks in part to flooding and ethanol, are going nuts, too. I don't want to go through a whole lesson here, but what it comes down to is, beer isn't getting cheaper to make. And yet in New York City, the capital city of New York City (shut up), there is beer for free, everywhere my friends go.

Also, I missed two ice cream socials. Unbelievable. Did you think ice cream socials existed? I thought they only happened in storybooks and stories about storybooks.

So on the train, I was trying to find some kind of silver lining to this whole healthier, clearer, more alert state of being. Then it hit me -- something Ballard, the roommate who is going through this training program with me, had said. Earlier in the day, he and I went to the annual Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. It was his first time to Coney, my second.

In this throng of people, many of them bizarrely costumed or happily intoxicated, he turned to me and said, "Makes me wish I could pick pockets."

Exactly right! On this F train at one o'clock Sunday morning, I could have been a superhero or a supervillain. My level alertness was supernaturally higher than all of the people who had been out poisoning themselves all night long, and if I put my mind to it, I could have scammed 'em all out of their tiny, fashionable wallets. The train was going from SoHo to Park Slope! Can you say "disposable income?" Damn!

So, if there's one good thing about getting healthier, it's that you're emboldened to pick pockets, or more classily, "to commit crimes of agility."

But instead I pretty much thought about which beer I'm going to drink in a week.

I also thought about -- and here's the gradual improvement we're looking for -- how much I've been enjoying running again, and I how I look forward to the increased challenge of six-day-a-week workouts that come in the next stage, starting next Monday.

Stay tuned for that, while I ask people to drink good whiskeys in front of me and describe them.

Follow Dave Burdick on Twitter: www.twitter.com/daveburdick

Comments

[OnTheCusp]

Dave, we sure miss you here in Boulder, dammit!

[MARTYB]

And when you have a girlfriend/wife, boyfriend/huband, women/men come out the woodwork.