Laughing without alcohol

A very serious quest!

Friends,

As I sat down on my sofa to write this post, my son threw himself on the ottoman where I was resting my feet and started pulling hairs on my leg. I flinched and glared at him over my laptop. “Stop!”

He giggled. “Remember when Stacy did that in my kindergarten class last year?” 

He was referring to the time last year when I read a book to his kindergarten class. I was sitting on a kid-sized chair reading about dragons with 20 little ones sitting on the floor in front of me. A little girl named Stacy, seated at my left foot, started picking at my leg hairs while I was reading. I didn’t want to shame the little girl, so I would casually jerk my leg away while maintaining the steady beat of my reading. Then she would find my leg again and start picking. It felt like I was living in a Seinfeld episode.

I looked back at my son and we both started laughing. “I remember,” I said with a bemused look. “Now stop picking my leg hairs.”

***

November 20th will mark three years since sipping my beloved bourbon or any other alcohol. It wasn’t like I was a train-wreck drunk. I had just gotten a little too used to drinking double Vodkas after putting my kid to bed throughout Covid. And I was depressed after so much time under lockdowns. Being mildly hungover every day didn’t help. It made me feel anxious and irritable. It made life feel heavier, not lighter.

After moving to Florida and enrolling my then-three-year-old into preschool, I knew I needed to do something to pull myself out of my rut. I recall a moment when my son poured a bucket of water on the bathroom floor of our new home while he was taking a bath. I yelled Why did you do that! in a nastier way than I should have and then bit my lower lip. I didn’t touch him or anything, but seconds afterwards I felt flush with shame for losing my cool. And I will never forget the sting of my teeth on my lower lip, an echo of memory reminding me to become the kind of parent I wanted to be. 

With that feeling of fresh teeth marks on my lip, I decided to quit alcohol for a year, beginning November 20th, 2020. I stuck with it and then, when the year was up, I decided to keep my sober streak going. I knew I was a better man and parent for it. Why not keep it up while my kid is young? So that’s what I have done.

Going alcohol-free has not always been easy. I remember my first time going to a bar in Florida without drinking, realizing I could no longer rely on a Maker's Manhattan to facilitate my relaxation and social interactions. I now had to face the world with grapefruit La Croix, metaphorically and literally. Life felt duller. There were moments when I looked at myself and thought, Wow, you are so serious and boring Jeff. Lighten up! 

Then things got better. Over time, the low-hum of anxious energy disappeared. I made friends. I regained a sense of lightness.  

Last month, with my three year milestone on the horizon, I decided I want to laugh more. It is a serious intention! I want to lose myself in hilarity as warm tropical wind blows in my face. I want tissues nearby to wipe the tears from laugh-crying. The question was, how do I do this?

So I did what I do with any new goal — nerd out on it and (now) write about it. I researched frontal lobe shrinkage, sought advice from ChatGPT in the voice of Oprah and David Sedaris, and read listicle-articles about “healthy ways to unwind.” I researched local stand-up comedy classes and improv crews. I even dreamed up a self-coaching exercise: What if I kept a ‘laughing journal’ to keep track of every time I laugh? Maybe I could find patterns.

Photo by Dawin Rizzo on Unsplash

During Write of Passage, the writing program I just finished, we did an exercise where participants partnered up and were asked to describe the style they saw in the other person’s writing. “You’re funny Jeff,” said my partner in the exercise, a dark-haired woman who smiles a lot and writes colorful dispatches under the pseudonym Charlie Bleecker. I received Charlie’s observation with suspicion, thinking of an old pick-up mantra I heard during my teenage years. Tell a smart girl she’s pretty, tell a pretty girl she’s smart. By calling me funny was she saying I wasn’t?

Instead of laughing, I furrowed my brow and looked at her in Zoom. “You’re suggesting that being funny is part of my writing style?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Oh,” I said, as my body twitched awkwardly, a bit like when Stacy picked my leg hairs. “Ok.” Then I thought about the many times I giggled while scribbling something low-key funny during the program.

A few days after that exchange, Matthew Perry died. I read obituaries about how infectious his humor was. How he left a trail of laughter wherever he went. A friend pointed out that comedians were notorious for depression and suicide, implying that Perry’s humor had a dark side. They call it the sad clown paradox. That’s grim, I thought to myself. Maybe laughter was a light in the darkness for some people, a way to vacuum their hurt and spit it out as humor. Maybe toxic laughing is a thing when it is used to conceal, deny, or repress underlying pain. Maybe laughter is an esoteric expression of goth. Woah!

The truth is, I have a general sense of well-being today, and not drinking has helped. Dare I say I am happy. Dare I say I am funny at times. Dare I say I still want to laugh more.

Just relax, I tell myself, as I feel another baby bumblebee sting on my leg. My son looks at me with a naughty smile, and I am overcome with an annoyance that is joyful. I feel a smile from the inside spring forth, onto my face, like a geyser that says, I ain’t staying underground no more.

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Thank you to CansaFis Foote Heather King Tiff Willson Started on Tolkien and others for feedback.

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