Member-only story
Breaking Up with Jack (Daniel)
Or … how I learned to travel through time
Last August, after 50 years of running wild with Jack Daniel, I stopped drinking for good. My year on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was coming to a close, and the oppressive summer heat had forced me aboard my battered fishing boat, searching for sweet breezes and fat redfish.
I didn’t have a particularly dramatic reason for leaving Jack. No titillating “I woke up in a dumpster” story or scary hospital visit. It felt simple to me, I tried to explain to my friends. Breaking up was the natural next step in the process.
“Process?” my best friend asked.
“The editing process,” I nodded. “The script of my life. The drinking doesn’t fit anymore. It doesn’t belong in this next chapter.”
It was just … over.
Cutting things out of my world has always come easily. As an editor, I slash whole paragraphs, snip words at both ends, take a blade to extraneous details. Burn, baby, burn is my philosophy. I don’t mourn my little darlings; I delight in slitting their throats.
And after some decades of living with a dagger in your hand, you become not only adept at cutting, but entirely too enthusiastic about it. You turn your attention from words to structures and habits and beings. What else…
