Robert Manners

April...We Hardly Knew Ye!

So here we are in the last few minutes of the month of April 2002. Big freakin' whoop!



Actually, it has been rather an eventful month. The Spring Fling. My first formal Fifth Step with a new(ish) sponsor. Mega shopping. The Miss Gay Marin Pageant. Taxes. That whole nasty Israel/Palestine thing. HSN bracelet obsession. New website under construction. Hmmm.



Well, I tried one more new thing to get Blogger to publish to my new Mannersism.net, but it was still a no-go. The thing is that I think my FTP space just doesn't want to accept new HTML files from outside publishing sources. Maybe I am using the wrong FTP pathname, or maybe it's a security feature that I could possibly get rid of. I don't know. I just don't know enough about any of this coding stuff to really be a true blog-head (or whatever newfangled thing you kids are calling it these days). Pretty soon I am going to start pestering my few blog-buddies to help me out. But for now I'll keep trying to figure it out on my own...if I haven't gotten anywhere by this time next week, I am calling in the experts...any experts reading this had better brace yourselves.



So here comes May! May is always an exciting month. School is winding to a close, which means lot of work for my office...we have to get the Budget passed, we have to send out the Hudson Report to all the nonmembers, we have to counsel all the part-timers on how to get EDD benefits during the summer break, we have to get all the Executive Council business wrapped up, and so on and so forth. Then the whole thing comes to a crashing halt for three months and we all start taking our vacations (my vacation: take the Grandmother to Texas to visit her sister...oh, West Texas in the Summer, I can't wait).



May is also the month of my sobriety date. Seven years ago, I was winding up my Community College education, getting ready to transfer to San Francisco State, and though I didn't know it until the end of the month, I was hitting bottom with my alcoholism. The day after graduation, the day of my last final (Statistics, I got an A, of course), I went down to my favorite early-in-the-day cocktail dive and had some champagne to celebrate (Friexenet, a surprisingly classy brand for a shockingly tacky bar). After a while the champagne got tiring so I switched to wine. Then I went to another bar and switched to peppermint schnapps. Then eventually I reverted to my "usual," vodka tonics. Then I went home...on the way, I was kicked off the AC Transit bus, I threw up on the sidewalk, then threw up in an alley closer to home, then passed out on my own front porch. The next day Grandmother was very unhappy with me (to say the extreme least), and told me, after screaming at me and my hangover for two hours solid, that I either had to quit drinking or I had to move out. Well!



I'll show her, I thought, I'll move out and then where will she be? Where will I go, though? Get my own place? With no money, just student loans and a student-aide job? I guess I could move into the dorms at State...a 27-year-old fag living in an apartment with a pack of straight 18-year-olds...or...or I can just pretend I've quit drinking and let Grandmother think she's won...or I can stop drinking until I get out of school...oh, hell, let's get honest with ourself...I'm about to get kicked out of my family home, about to completely alienate the only person who's ever looked after me, about to lose everything I have and cherish and value, all for drinking...is this a fair trade? No, it's not. I guess I do have a problem. This is actually only the barest summary of my thought processes that day, but you get the idea. Later that evening, I went to an AA meeting, and my life started changing for the good. I've never looked back.



So anyway. Here comes May. There goes April. My other Farewell-to-April activity today was uploading more beefcake to punctuate my posts with. So have a gander at this one: