The Opposite Shore
As promised in my last series of posts, here’s the story of why I took a break from publishing essays due to turning my full attention to doing something really hard, to make something right. I’d been in denial about it for decades, it was time to make a change, so I did it.
I finally watched Dirty Dancing.
I know.
Everybody reacts the same way… “Whaaat?!? You’ve never watched THE DIRTY D? HOW?” You’re looking at me with bewildered incredulity, just like my Xennial sister-in-law did a couple years ago when I let it slip at a family gathering that I had never actually seen this obligatory piece of Gen X theatrical scripture in its entirety.
I could easily spend this whole essay explaining myself and making logistical excuses for this baffling omission, like how I had only absorbed it laterally by way of monocultural osmosis, the way one could in the late 1980s and 1990s, when movies had soundtracks and soundtracks were their own thing, and were played in boomboxes at friends’ houses, and those songs had music videos that were played on MTV and those videos were basically montages of the movie so generous in their summation of the movie’s plot that if you saw the music video, you felt like you basically got the gist of the movie. So, I just assumed that I saw it, like I had done with St. Elmo’s Fire, Purple Rain, Top Gun and others…..but none of that explaining would be of much relevance to the important question of Why now?, which is really what this essay is about.
For the record, I have since seen all the aforementioned movies in their entirety for the first time under these far-removed, acontextual mid-life conditions, and all of which were rewardingly elucidating in a OH-so-THAT’S-what-I-missed kind of way…. but the Dirty D was the last big domino, the last frontier, the last obvious move I hadn’t made.
If you’ve read anything I’ve written before, then I’m sure you can infer how this happened: Of course, I was playing the role of pretentious teenage art-skater by the fall of 1987 and thus, thought this movie was intellectually and artistically beneath me. I had, by the time of the movie’s release, hitched my wagon to non-conformity in all things- music, art, clothing, hobbies, movies (though I had started calling them “films”) and I rejected anything I considered mainstream.
I’ve written whole essays already about my foray into proto-boho affectation and referenced this era in other writings so I won’t rehash it here, but yeah, for all I gained from this counter-cultural cosplay, I missed some things in my teens and twenties that I’m now playing catch-up on in my fifties. I’m recovering some of what I left behind, things I thought I didn’t need at the time, but that look quite different from here.
I’m flirting with the idea that I may be more than what I have thought I was before. Until this recent threshold-crossing, I rationalized living in this state of voluntary ignorance for a long time- clung to it, in fact, as if to protect some imagined unsullied purity, and also in aimless defiance of some imagined mandate, long expired, if it had even ever existed in the first place. Privately, I kinda liked being the last undirty, danceless man in America.
I mean... I had known that a watermelon was carried somewhere and that somebody put some baby in some corner, and that another person had some strong words to say about how nobody should ever do that, but I guess I was never interested enough to connect the actual dots and put those phrases into their context and reap the rewards of absorbing these ingredients in their full-spectrum, organic nutritional form. I understood here (points to own skull) but had never allowed myself to understand here (points to own gut). I think I was a little bit scared of what it might feel like to be kind of a normal person.
And now? Well…. it’s a whole new world.
I’m not sure that I can explain why, but I suspect I’m probably enjoying these reclaimed cinematic artifacts more now than I ever would have in the time of their release. It’s especially fun to have those people who are incredulous that I’ve never seen some iconic movie accompany me when I do. They watch ME watching the movie, and they are usually quite entertained. I suppose it’s vicarious joy, like watching children open birthday presents. Sometimes, as in the case of Wayne’s World, I suddenly absorb the context of jokes that everyone around me has been making for the last thirty-something years that I had previously pretended to get. I now know where “Schwing!” comes from, which, it could be argued, makes me a more complete human being (or not).
So yeah….I did the Dirty D, that was a pretty big deal, and I really wanted to tell you about it here. I also did this other kinda significant thing, which is that I ended a 36-year relationship with alcohol.
Yeah, I quit drinking for real. (Perhaps I buried the lede?)
Not to distance myself from others who have found themselves needing to take this transformative step for their own reasons, but I feel that I should qualify this by explaining that I was not Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, nor Tom Hanks on Family Ties drinking a whole bottle of Vanilla Extract, I was more like Richard Ashcroft of The Verve solemnly waking up to the fact that The Drugs Don’t Work. I’d had a long, habitual, mostly non-catastrophic relationship with alcohol that just ran its course. It no longer did what I started using it to do, and then it gradually kinda started doing what I never needed or wanted it to do.
It was a simple decision that I had previously made too complicated. I was tired, unhappy with myself, bloated and underslept...I just felt done. And I arrived here logically: if I’m going to question my relationship with so many other aspects of the modern culture machine- Technological dependency, internalized capitalism, toxic masculinity, materialism and other metaphorical poisons, then I should also question how much sense it made for me to be psychologically and emotionally tethered to a literal one.
I had been flirting with the concept of Sober-curious for a long time, trying A Few Days Off here, A Couple Weeks Off there, crafting moderation strategies like Never On A Weekday and No More Than Two, and so forth. And while this helped me cut down gradually over time, it still required too much thinking and planning and wrangling of cravings and I started longing for relief from all of that finessing. There were two ways I could go: I could try to Turn Back Time like Cher or I could pull an R.E.M. and call it a career, and I think it’s safe to assume that nobody wants to see me with a perm straddling a navy cannon in a thong onesie- not literally, not metaphorically. The Universe created one person who could pull this off, and it ain't me.
So I was mulling all of this over when, in late January, the country’s recent…..development manifested in all its…..glory , and I could immediately tell that any moderation strategy would be instantly overridden by my impulse to anesthetize with the most convenient medicine available . Five days later, I watched the film The Substance, in which Demi Moore’s character, observing her systemic devaluation in the world of celebrity as an aging woman in her 50’s, takes a mysterious substance that promises to make her feel and look like a younger version of herself. For a while, the substance delivers and she enjoys its’ effects, which compel her to continue taking more and more of it despite warnings from its’ anonymous creator and some increasing…side effects. This pattern continues until (spoiler alert) things become…..grotesque.
Though clearly a pointed critique of the sexist ageism of celebrity culture toward women, I experienced this film as an allegory for my own youth-grasping liquid desperation. I used alcohol to dull midlife aches and pains, ease aged social insecurities and to a certain degree that it pains me to admit, to enhance my trite and glamorized cosplay of the beat-inspired Young Drunken Romantic Poet Howling At The Moon archetype. But that night, I’d drunk five stout beers and there was nothing romantic about it: I just felt gross, the precursor to grotesque. I fell asleep that night feeling like a Quincy’s Steakhouse Big Fat Yeast Roll, and at 53, that just ain’t what you want.
I opened my eyes the next morning and heard some wise part of me asking, “What if I just leaned even harder into fiftysomethingness and let go of this youthful-relevance horseshit altogether? What if I just stopped trying to keep up and gave myself permission to have the stiffness and slowness and awkwardness and crankyness? What if I just said NO to things I don’t want to do or feel expected to do instead of drinking to ease the experience? If I could truly embrace this stage of life unapprehensively, would I even need the alcohol?” What if I doubled down on being the best damn tea-sippin’, sittin’ downin’, book-readin’, cardigan-rockin’, nap-takin’, documentary-watchin’, home-stayin’-at, self-carin’, age-accepting me I could be?"
Would I even miss it?
So here I am, just shy of the eight-month mark, with many of the benefits and costs of this experiment now revealed, and while I am certainly enjoying all this tea-sippin’ serenity, I’m also experiencing a recovery of a version of me before alcohol became a fixture in my lifestyle. So maybe I still am actually grasping at youth, except now I’m reaching back much farther: My best guess is that that was about, say….the first 17 years of my life that I was living unfiltered. So I am walking around some days as a 17 year old in a 53 year old’s body. Sounds about right. Actually, maybe I am Tom Hanks, just more like the character he plays in Big.
It’s an accepted theory in the psychology of social learning that when one starts using a substance to get by in life, this learning is arrested at that age, so that if one should decide to stop using that substance, they resume their unfiltered social learning process at the level it was arrested. This explains why so many of the grown adults I counseled and worked with in my 5 years of substance misuse counseling at the beginning of my therapy career often acted like petulant and awkward teenagers, much to their own confusion. This is not to denigrate them: on a brain level, a social skills level, they sort of were teenagers. I’m noticing this in myself, too, and having to acclimate to the awkwardness of unfiltered social contact. This, to my surprise, is not all bad, though, because I’m also enjoying the permission to revisit other qualities of the pre-alcohol version of myself, like joy.
Like frickin' JOY.
Another scientifically theorized phenomenon of human psychology is something called the U-shaped Curve of Happiness, that posits that life-satisfaction is highest in youth, then dips significantly in mid-life, but rises again in the last third of the life cycle. While the evidence suggests that cultural factors have much to do with this pattern (it’s mostly observed in wealthier, more industrialized societies), I wonder if I might finally be experiencing some graceful ascension after a long slog in the saggy, full diaper at the bottom of this U, and that getting sober is me dropping these Huggies and baby-wiping myself clean so this lil' butt is free to rise, with less chafing.
Consider the following curious symmetry:
July 1985: I’m 12 years old in the summer between 7th and 8th grade. I’ve got about six wispy, light-brown hairs in my left armpit, maybe two in my right? I’m getting painful pimples on my nose and chin, and for the first time in my life, I’m not the shortest kid I know. I am preoccupied with a new feeling of attraction to my female peers that transcends the bounds of previous attractions and encompasses a deeper, animal desire that I learn from peers is called “horny-ness” and I have no idea what to do with it. It’s simultaneously a feeling I want and don’t want at the same time.
I start growing fast, and my legs ache constantly, for which I chew mom-dispensed, orange children’s aspirin almost daily. I’m given the chore of mowing the lawn for the first time, so that summer I don foam-padded headphones plugged into a Radio Shack am/fm cassette player and tune the radio to the top 40 station, which is playing my favorite song of the moment, Everybody Wants To Rule The World to which I choreograph an oblong spiral pattern in the grass of the front lawn . It’s a very hot summer in Charlotte, NC, and for the first time ever in my life, we now have air conditioning- a Whirlpool window unit that I put my face inches from for hours of the day, breathing in the off-gassing fumes of god-only-knows-what-chemicals a 1980’s window unit burns but MY LORD, does this feel like the sweetest relief of heaven.
The time that followed was expectant, uncertain, anxious, thrilling. In my peak skateboarding days, I was never under the influence of any mind-altering substance and yet I could attain the experience of optimum stoke. I developed new crushes on girls, songs, skateboarding spots, books, movies, experiences at an accelerated rate. I craved discovery, the possibility of emerging adulthood. I now understand from years of learning about neurochemistry and its relationship with emotion and perception that I had a relatively fully-intact dopamine system that was still capable of experiencing pleasure and stimulation through everyday, organic human experiences. I was living unshielded, for better and for worse.
In High School, at some party, with some people, somebody, somewhere gave me a Bartles & James Wine Cooler and I decided to try it. It went down easy, and in a few minutes, things around me felt glowy and giddy, the party and everyone at it felt coated with a thin layer of shiny oil I could just slide around on. I remember thinking “OH…..this feels so much easier.” Like the alcoholic writer Charles Bukowski recalls in his memoir Ham On Rye, I noted inwardly “This is gonna help me for a long, long time”. And that was the moment I traded full-spectrum aliveness for a curated selective experience in which I could choose to only feel what I wanted to feel and medicate anything I didn’t.
So it’s the period of time just before I made this consequential decision that I am trying to find my way back to, so that I can resume my life. It feels like I’ve been living in a commercial break for 36 years. We now return to the regularly scheduled broadcast, already in progress.
July 2025: I’m 52 years old in the summer between 47th and 48th grade. I’ve got about sixteen coarse, silver-black hairs emerging from my left ear canal, maybe more in my right? I’m getting new moles and skin tags and random discolorations on my skin, and for the first time in my life, I’m a half-inch shorter when they measure me at the doctor’s office. I’m experiencing a new, somewhat more indifferent relationship with libido, and “horny-ness” is a ship that has long sailed. It’s simultaneously a feeling I want and don’t want at the same time.
I stop sleeping well, and my lower back and hips (and knees and shoulders and pretty much everything else) ache constantly, for which I swallow wife-dispensed, orange ibuprofen on the reg. I’ve taken on the chore of loading the dishwasher every day, so this summer I don bluetooth earbuds wirelessly connected to my iPhone, and it defaults to the Hot 80’s Summer playlist, which is playing (arguably) my favorite song of all time Everybody Wants To Rule The World to which I choreograph an oblong spiral pattern of suds on each dirty plate. It’s a very hot summer in Asheville, NC, and for the first time ever in my life, we now have access to a swimming pool: a kidney-shaped apartment amenity that I submerge myself in for brief windows of time throughout the day, breathing in the off-gassing fumes of god-only-knows-what-chemicals a 2025 swimming pool requires but MY LORD, does this feel like the sweetest relief of heaven.
That summer, on a beach trip with family, somebody gives me a bowl of ice cream, somebody else declares that tonight is the night I watch Dirty Dancing, and still somebody else sits me onto the couch. The movie goes down easy, and about halfway into it, I feel a peaceful satisfaction, like something is clicking into place. I think “OH…..saying yes to this feels so right.” Like the sober writer Anne Lamott recalls in her essay Ham Of God, I noted inwardly “...and it seems, but only seems, that you went from parched to overflow in the blink of an eye”.
I’m aware in this moment that I’ve emerged on the opposite shore of the U, a reflection in the mirror of those last teenaged years I was fully contacting lived experience without chemical augmentation. A second, inverse adolescence. A mid-olescence. Only on this shore, I have some real shit behind me now, acceptance is a guiding and embodied strategy, so I can handle the messiness better. I can live with it. They call this living clean, but here I am somehow, raw-dogging life and dancing dirty.