“Be ruthless about what you ignore. Time, energy, and resources are so precious. You have to be ferocious about cutting your priorities—more than you realize and certainly more than is comfortable. You can only deeply commit to a few things. One or two? Maybe three? Every pretty good, sorta nice, kinda fun thing you abandon is like shedding a weighted vest that lets you move at top speed. You were so busy focusing on how much you could carry, you never realized you could run this fast.”

– James Clear

The end of December marked the end of two experiments: not wearing jeans and not drinking alcohol. 

My parties in Cleveland used to be…legendary. They were small, no more than 20-30 people at most, but people would drive in from other states for them, would rearrange birthday parties to attend them. At one point, I think I had something like seven different fully-stocked bars in my house – two in the living room, just so I didn’t have to cross the room to get a drink. I don’t think I was an alcoholic, and I rarely drank when I was at home; I just really enjoyed hosting and entertaining people. 

But in 2017, Alice decided to spend a year without alcohol, and I decided to do the same for 2023. It wasn’t hard; when asked, I said, truthfully, that I wanted to read more, write more, and spend more time being present with my kids, and I was finding that if I had even a single drink, my ability to interpret a paragraph, or write a letter, or put together a Brio track that didn’t end in a death loop was diminished significantly. Scottish culture places a big emphasis on drinking, but nobody ever made me feel weird for stopping – I actually found out that a bunch of my friends here are completely sober, or wanted to try it but felt that they couldn’t, so I felt very supported during the whole thing. 

And it was amazing. I read a lot, wrote a lot, and had amazing times with my family. Throughout the year, I kept wondering why I had spent so much time in the past having a drink just out of habit, then losing my evenings. The only thing I found myself missing, strangely, was red wine. My neighbors, Cathy and Cello, knew this, and so for Christmas they bought me a bottle of extremely nice organic Italian wine. When I opened it, it smelled like butter; the first taste was exquisite, an incredible mouthful of beauty and culture. 

But I immediately felt weights pulling down on every part of my brain. The zen/observational part of my consciousness wanted to embrace them, to feel what it was really like to have them back; a year ago, I would have experienced it as normal, but now, it felt like an alien invasion. I had one, then two, then three tiny glasses, enjoying the taste but feeling the incredible impact on my mental processes. After that, I pushed the cork into the bottle and had a giant glass of lemon water. The next day, the bottle was sitting on our kitchen table; I opened it again and had another tiny glass, then a second. A couple of years ago, I might have finished the whole bottle in one night; now, after two nights, I was about a third of the way through, with little incentive to continue. The butter was gone, too, and I started to just taste copper and iron, so I poured the rest of it into a glass jar to make wonderful vinegar. (Sorry, Cello and Cathy!)

Before that, I’d gone to two Christmas parties – one for my club, one for Jiu-Jitsu. At both, I was one of the only sober people present, and at both, I felt a relative clarity, a relative level of self-control, that I can only describe as feeling like a superpower. While everyone else intentionally dulled their ability to make conversation, I retained mine and, in relation to them, it felt as if I suddenly was operating at a higher level than they were, that I was able to do more, better, just by the sheer dint of drinking water. 

The first party was a Wednesday; the second, a Saturday. The following Monday, these thoughts were marinating in my head when I went to the gym in the morning. I usually arrive about five minutes before it opens, which gives me the opportunity to talk to some of the other members before we start working out, but on this morning, I didn’t know any of the five or six other people waiting, and they didn’t know each other, either. They defaulted to what is now standard behavior: they all checked their phones. I stood there watching them, seeing their thumbs scrolling, heads hunched over, and realized it was almost the same thing as drinking – they were trapped in an addictive, impulsive, unconscious behavior that weakend their ability to actively participate in the world. I simultaneously wanted to shout at them to wake up, to put down their phones and be present, but I also wanted to preserve my relative advantages…so I just watched them until the gates opened and they could all put their earbuds in and drown out all other sounds, scrolling between sets. 

Fitzgerald wrote of Daisy that, “It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.” I am grateful for the opportunity to experience this, and to really, actively consider going back to my Nokia. 

An aspect of not drinking that I didn’t anticipate: a long time ago, I read a piece by a former smoker about what he missed about smoking. He didn’t miss the tobacco as much as the ritual and tools surrounding smoking – the packing of cigarettes, peeling off the plastic, tapping the first one out, then flicking open his Zippo and sparking it to life. At the end of December, I opened up a box and found two old cast iron bottle openers that I got with Eli Miller, now dead, from a sale at a conference center in Burton, Ohio, and a silver travel corkscrew that I got from an antique shop, now closed, in Wells, Somerset. I was immediately flooded with love for these things – for their bare utility, for the ritual they enable, for the possibilities that they can unfold. Putting them back in the box felt like shutting out possibilities that existed for me, a nostalgia for things that hadn’t happened yet, but could have if only I had used these simple tools. I will certainly keep them, but if I pass them down to Daniel and Nick, I somehow doubt they will associate them with any old memories; I doubt they will ever see me using them at all. 

And also in 2023, I decided to not wear jeans. I can’t remember, now, what prompted it; I just know that suddenly, I was wearing the same pairs of khakis in a cycle. Over the year, I started collecting nicer shirts, too, and then sport jackets; by the end of the year, I was putting on a tie to take out the recycling. I found that it took a nominal amount more time than normal to get dressed, but the rewards were disproportionately large. The main one: people started giving me things for free. The guy in the coffee shop across the street would give me free pastries; I got discounts on stuff I was buying in grocery stores without asking. Once, when buying groceries, the guy behind the till just gave me an apple I was getting for Daniel; he rang up everything else, and didn’t need to give me it for free, but he seemed to just feel the impulse. 

About a week into January, I washed a couple of pairs of Levi’s that I found in a box in my closet, dried them by the fire so they were stiff, and put one on. They were heavy, and felt strange. I could fit a lot in the pockets, but suddenly didn’t want things in my jeans pockets – I wanted them in my jacket pocket, just like I had gotten used to. I have worn them once or twice, but they are now novelties; I feel more at home with a tie than a t-shirt. And that feels good. 

An unexpected bonus: Daniel and Nick now insist on wearing bow ties everywhere. 

Besides a bow tie phase, Daniel is making progress; he has now decisively entered the age of dinosaurs, puzzles, and games. He loves titanosaurs after we saw an Argentinosaurus skeleton in London, and so that takes up a significant amount of time and energy. He is also now into Rubik’s Cubes and Snakes and Ladders (Chutes and Ladders, but closer to the Indian original). He plays without judgment on getting snakes or ladders; he just wants someone to win, without regard of whether he is the winner or not. It is almost as if he knows that the goal is the play, and that it is a game of chance; he doesn’t see the other people as competitors, but as teammates. He has started to play Bingo with the same lack of attachment to an outcome, and I am working on teaching him dominoes, too. 

Which made me think: these are things I think Daniel and Nick need to know before they reach adulthood, and possibly before they reach double-digits in age:

1. A working knowledge of chess, backgammon, dominoes, various forms of rummy, darts, pool, and bowling. I want them to be able to hold their own in any bar in the world. 
2. How to tie neckties and bow ties. 
3. How to strop a razor. 
4. General leather care – shoe shining, leather hydration, maybe how to saddle stitch.
5. How to make crepes from scratch, without measuring the ingredients.
6. How to approach dogs.
7. How to say “Thank You” in at least five different, useful languages.
8. How to grow jade, mint, philodendron, and tradescantia zebrina plants from clippings.
9. How to identify edible herbs on sight.
10. How to get so lost in a book that they forget to eat.
11. How to fill a fountain pen, then empty it again.
12. How to solve a Rubik’s Cube.
13. How to have at least three strong, informed opinions about things that don’t really matter much in the grand scheme of life. 
14. How to make a lasagna from scratch.
15. How to listen to people.
16. How to make chili, coq au vin, stew, and curry (and other things that are the same basic recipe, but different ingredients).
17. How to season cast iron skillets after they mess them up.
18. How to use simple magic tricks to get children to stop crying.
19. How to fix a broken Zippo.
20. How to bait a hook.

Nick…is in love with Daniel, except he can’t really say “Daniel” so he says “Nanyul.” His vocabulary is stretching to two and three syllables, and he knows far more than he is able to currently say. He is decisive, and funny, and jumps into everything eagerly and completely. He is also developing a sense of humor, alongside Daniel, who is, himself, starting to get into jokes. Just before Christmas, we taught him some knock knock jokes, and while he thinks normal knock knock jokes are funny, he makes up his own – for example,

Daniel: Knock Knock. 

Me: Who’s there?

Daniel: Porridge. 

Me: Porridge who?

Daniel: I’ll eat you up. 

Nick, for his part, then wades in:

Nick: Knock Knock. 

Me: Who’s there?

Nick: Gah Gah. 

Me: Gah Gah who?

Nick: (either shakes his head vigorously, or mutters some syllables.)

Books. The year of Pulitzers ended with “Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” It took me a minute to warm to it; it won in 1990, and was very much of its time and place. At the same time, it is a story of a man’s reflections on life when he is dying, and how everything hangs together, and in its focus on uncertain memories and the tragedy of human lives and frailties and passions, it tore my heart apart. It wasn’t until the end of the first section, the last few pages, where I felt like at the end of The Road, or Less, like everything was a setup for a tiny snippet of text – a perfect word or sentence – that overwhelms the reader with emotion. It was excellent. Pulitzers are excellent. 

I finished it about the time that my former landlord, friend, and the officiant at our wedding, David Rossi, died unexpectedly at 65. I don’t know what happened; I don’t feel comfortable asking his widow about it. But with him and Alex gone in one year, I feel as if life has taken a turn – that this is when the notices, the emails, the messages, the phone calls, start pouring in – that is, if I am not one of them myself soon. In a Stephen Covey way, what do I want to say? What do I want to be said? This has started to consume me, but not in a morbid way – in a “what do I need to do every day to kick ass and give Daniel and Nick good memories of me in case it is my last day?” way. The thing I am grateful for with David is that while we didn’t stay in very regular communication, we still exchanged one or two messages a year that amounted to, more or less, “I love you, and you are important to me, and I am thinking of you.” As Meyer Wolfsheim advised, I was grateful that I was able to show my friendship for a man when he was alive and not after he was dead. 

But I need to do that more.