I meant to watch Sideways years ago. Somewhere between “I only drink after 5pm” and “Jack & Coke makes a great mouthwash,” it fell off my to-do list. The movie appealed to me for three reasons:

1. I love Paul Giamatti;
2. I love Alexander Payne (director of Election); and
3. I loved wine.

While I preferred hard liquor for getting drunk, I loved wine for camouflage. Wine carries with it a snobbery that provides perfect cover for an alcoholic. I don’t have a problem, goddammit – I’m a connoisseur. A connoisseur constantly seeking samples. Even before I admitted I had a problem, I had a niggling feeling deep in my bowels that all my talk of tannins and the aftertaste of apple and pear was fancy-speak for “refill.” After all, I measured my wine consumption by the box.

Fast forward to 2010, five months into Round 2 of sobriety. I put Sideways on my Netflix queue. I may avoid wine, but hell, I still love Paul Giamatti. I adored his turn as Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, a role which earned him much critical acclaim, but did little for his commercial appeal. Sideways is the flick that put this talented actor on the map. I can see why. Giamatti’s Miles is the kind of guy you can’t decide if you want to hug or run over with a Hummer. He’s smart, amiable, a touch arrogant, beset by rejection, and prone to self-loathing. With his marriage long dead, his closest friendship is his old college roommate Jack, a Lothario who measures wine by its chugability.(Yes, that’s a word. Look it up in a few years, once the dictionaries catch up to me.)

Sideways is a tour de force of drunkenness, adultery, hope, despondency, and love. It’s a great film – but one that is, at times, a bitch to watch sober. The movie revolves around Miles and Jack’s trip through California’s wine country before Jack, an expiring actor, marries into money. The scenery is lush, rolling acres of green, of plump grapes nearly bursting on the vine. Along the way, Miles the struggling writer puts the full force of his talent behind explaining to Jack the deep mysteries of wine: how to judge color, pick up the bouquet, and separate the complexities as you swish the initial sip around in your mouth. Miles doesn’t simply like wine, or even love wine. Miles has a romance with wine. Lacking any significant connections to other human beings, it’s become his significant other – his exhilarating partner when things go well, and his lonely refuge when life turns sour.

Since Miles’ life is a package of Sour Patch Kids, he spends a good portion of the film either stumbling around drunk, or dragging a hangover around like a lead weight. Which I enjoyed watching. Okay, “enjoyed” is too sadistic. What I mean is that watching drunk people can be a boon to my sobriety. A few years ago, I hung out with friends of friends for the 4th of July. At the time I hadn’t had a drop to drink in over a year. Seeing everyone at the party get progressively wasted made it easier to steer clear of temptation. When your friend is telling you how much he loves you in sentences where every second word is so slurred that it’s unintelligible, you wonder, “Whatever made me think this was fun?”

But that’s not sustainable. It becomes sobriety through schadenfreude. For that reason, I don’t think I’ll ever give Sideways a second viewing. It feels too much like watching home movies of your ex-girlfriend with a box of Kleenex and a half-gallon of ice cream nestled in your lap. I’ll get my next Giamatti fixes from Cold Souls and Shoot ‘Em Up instead.

And no, you can’t talk me out of Shoot ‘Em Up. It’s Giamatti with access to high-caliber weapons. How can that be anything less than brilliant??

Uncategorized alcoholism, cinema, film, movies, sideways, sobriety

I had lived in Seattle for 8 years, and had never owned a bike. I’d wanted to, but had always had a handy excuse (nervous wife, no money, yada yada). By the end of that term, alcohol had become my sole excuse, my sufficient and necessary condition. Taking work breaks at 3pm to pop down to a bar for a “relaxant” doesn’t jibe with staying physical. I woke up every morning feeling like I’d been run over; why risk the real sensation?

Shortly after I sobered up – after months spent drinking my soul out of my body, and my body into the ground – I bought a low-end mountain bike, bright-as-the-sun yellow, with thick tires that could withstand whatever abuse I might want to heap upon it. I hadn’t realized until I left the sports store how badly I had missed the machine of my youth. Riding home was like popping the cap on a bottle of Childhood: I felt joyous, invigorated, and free.

I spent the next year living and working in Oklahoma City, where I bike-commuted every day (read: every day the winds didn’t exceed 40 mph, threatening to knock me into oncoming semis with every gust). 20 miles round-trip. It was…nice. Quaint. And it left me fully unprepared for the joy and the agony that was my commute when I moved back to Seattle.

Separated by the expansive Lake Washington, Seattle and Bellevue are connected by two floating bridges – one north, one south. The south bridge is the only one that provides bike access. My new job was in the city, near the waterfront, but I was staying with good friends in Bellevue. So my first day of work, I sauntered out from the over-commercialized suburb toward a route I’d previously only taken by vehicle - a 14-mile cross-lake commute to the grit and activity of downtown Seattle. 

It’s one thing to drive across the bridge - encased in metal, daring to take only brief, 60mph glimpses of the lake and greenery when the days are pretty. It’s another to wind through the back-marshes of the ‘burbs, to churn up up up the path to where bridge meets land…and then to let fly with the pedals as your bike screams down the bridge path, the isolated traffic on your left of no concern, Lake Washington lolling around you on both sides and Mount Rainier lording over you from the south as the morning bite sheers your cheeks and you barrel faster and faster without fear or hesitation toward The Emerald City.

I’ll admit it: I whooped.

Given my 20-mile work commute in Oklahoma City, the 28 round-trip miles between Bellevue and Seattle wasn’t a stretch distance. I’d biked between Oklahoma City and nearby Norman in a single day – a 70-mile trip all told. But Oklahoma is flat. Seattle is San Francisco Jr. It’s Ithaca with more pines. Halfway back that night, I felt the differential in my thighs and ass. And that evening, my body throbbed. It wasn’t that “my muscles ached.” I had no individual muscles – they had fused together, Voltron-esque, into a single, pulsating polyp of pain. That was fucking stupid, I told myself. No way am I putting my body through that again.

I biked to work the next morning. And the next. Five times that week. Each night, I biked to a different Seattle neighborhood to have dinner before roaring back down to the bike path, tacking on up to an additional 15 miles to my daily riding. On Friday and Saturday nights, I was scheduled to see houses in elevated north Seattle; I biked to and from those as well, only wussing out and hopping the bus home once.I covered more of the city in a week than I usually traversed in a given year, pushing past the sharpening ache that now extended up my calves, through my abdomen, and into my pecs, lats and triceps.

On Saturday evening, I gave out. Collapsed. I couldn’t pedal another mile. While convalescing, I used Gmaps Pedometer to calculate my total mileage for the week: just under 200.

I grinned.

Why not? Sure, my body was beaten down. But it would build back up. I had dropped a full pant size in the span of a week. In a few days my muscles would heal and I’d climb back on, pedaling faster and longer than ever before. My kids would arrive in Seattle six weeks later to find a physical dad who could rough-and-tumble and go three rounds of freeze tag without getting winded.

Not to mention a dad who was still sober.

Uncategorized alcohol, bicycling, cycling, oklahoma city, seattle, sobriety