oak

So since that last entry, I've cut way back on the booze intake, for a couple reasons.

One is, it's just no good when your activities outside of work adversely affect your ability to work. In other words, if you can't pay, don't play.

But the more serious one is, that night and another night a couple days before, I had close calls with having accidents in my car.

Drunk driving is dumb.

When I lived in Dallas, I was really careful about stopping drinking early and loading up on water so I could drive home safely.

Then I moved to Chicago, where I could almost always walk home from wherever I was drinking, so I rarely was in my car anyways. After that, I moved to London, where I didn't even have a car at all, so I never had to worry about it in either of those places. I could drink all night and stagger (or catch a tube or bus) home, and no worries.

But now I'm back in a car-centric city, and it's taken me almost a year (holy fuck, seriously, I've been back from England for almost a year already!) to get a grip on the idea again that I can't be driving myself around wasted all the time. Or ever, for that matter.

But luckily I figued it out before I hurt anyone or got into any trouble.

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One year ago today, I was partying like a drunken animal in Portugal when I started getting phone calls and text messages telling me about the bombs going off in the tubes in London.