Fags, Booze and Reddit - Day 1

It's Saturday, which means precisely fuck-all when you're self-employed. These days even the banks are open on Saturday morning so if you can shake off the hangover and drag yourself into town there's plenty of time to bank a few cheques. Or, as it more often the case, buy yourself the largest sausage baguette in town and hope that, by sheer volume, will displace the toxins in your system.

But what's this? Carl started his week of clean(er) living last night so he's up bright and early, lifting the blind like the scales from his blinkered, alcoholic eyes and basking in the tremendous joy of being alive and free of his most destructive addictions! Well, that was the plan. As it happens, I woke up this morning feeling as rough as I would normally expect after a heavy night. As I said, I have no weekdays, hence by implication no weekend, so the presence of the hangover doesn't necessarily mean it is Saturday any more than the planned absence might have fooled me into thinking it wasn't. What bothers me is, whichever damn day of the week it's supposed to be, I am not supposed to have a head like a half deflated volleyball and a left lung that is definitely half full of cottage cheese when last night comprised only of a quiet movie, dinner and just one snout, I promise!

It was during said coffin nail that I decided this week was going to be free of my three nastiest habits. The trio of vices which keep me from fulfilling my potential, even if that potential is simply to get up before nine in the morning without feeling like some unforgivable crime has been committed against nature. Firstly, obviously, reddit.com. Seriously, whoever the hell came up with that site should be ashamed. If you're reading this and you work at Reddit, are you ashamed? You should be. I'm incapable of taking even a five second break in my workflow without checking Reddit to fill the gap. Rather than waste time waiting for Dreamweaver to boot up I'll wait for Firefox to load a new tab (which lately takes just as long) and then read half an hour's worth of stupid links about Ron Paul, that guy who was never going to be anything other than a footnote in an election in a country I haven't even visited in nearly two years. I reddit while I'm eating, I reddit while I reach for the mouse. I'll reddit while the phone rings - at my end. It's come to a pretty pass when addictive, pernicious, destructive drugs like that are unleashed on an unsuspecting public without even a Government health warning. I it wasn't for Reddit I strongly suspect would have been a millionaire by now. So I'm quitting it for a week which should, I've worked out, put me £25,000 in the black at least.

What else? Oh yes, beer. I keep going on about how beer doesn't really matter to me but I'm beginning to suspect that might not be the case. Back in 1998 I spent a short time at a school in New Hampshire, where I learned from their counsellor that if you drink more than ten units a week you're probably an alcoholic. At the time, I was drinking ten units every Saturday afternoon. I mean, come on. Not only have I been dining out on that story for ten years but I have also quite seriously used it as evidence that nobody knows anything about alcoholism, least of all my own which of course doesn't exist. Yeah, it took a bachelor's in psychology and seven years of thinking about it for me to realise that I might just be deluding myself very slightly. So I "won't miss it", eh? "I regularly don't drink for a week or more just by accident"? Prove it, you old soak. So I will. One week without beer. Or Reddit. Or cigarettes, just to make it worthwhile.

But I won't miss those, I barely smoke a pack a month. Coughcoughcough.

Anyway, like I said, first day not going well. I'm going to go for a run and see whether I start feeling better then. I'm also not going to think about how I didn't have a beer after lunchtime yesterday and how that might make the week that bit shorter. I read a certain website and smoked at midnight and that's that. No, honestly. It is.