"A safe nonalcoholic space"

   

Dall-E.

  If I want to be on page two in the paper, there's only room for about 750 words, so tangents often must get shorn away.
     For instance.

     My column Wednesday on Go Brewing, the non-alcoholic brewery in Naperville, lost a digression where I marvel at the tone of the sober movement, citing a line from 2019.  

   "Cindy’s at the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, has created a safe nonalcoholic space by replacing the word 'mocktail' on the bar’s menus," noted Vox, calling Chicago "a hub of sober curiosity." 

    Where to begin with that sentence? Is "mocktail" pejorative? A kind of NA shaming? Or "sober curiosity," a term that makes not drinking sound almost like a variety of fetish.
     And don't get me started with "safe nonalcoholic space." Wouldn't that be most places? Your car? Your kid's school? Just about anywhere?

     Not that I want to wax snide. I know what they mean. When people are new in sobriety, it can seem the world is one vast bar, their acquaintances, a hallelujah chorus for relapse. I was fortunate in that I immediately understood that nobody can stay sober by pretending they don't know where the booze is. Staying out of squishy places might be necessary in the initial turmoil of rehab. But very quickly you need to be able to not drink even when people all around you are.

     Eventually you realize that nobody cares what you drink. Mostly. I seem to remember that young people, more susceptible to peer pressure, do care. For a while. They like to go out and party and reinforce each other by going after the stragglers. For those who resist joining in on the fun, not drinking can result in real ostracization. Or even for the not so young. I remember being in my early 40s, trying to cut back, ordering non-alcoholic drinks when out with certain boozehound newspaper friends and getting ridiculed. 

     Now people urging me to drink merely draw a sense of amused wonder. "What? Really? You mean you don't know?" For my literary guide to recovery, "Out of the Wreck I Rise," I had to raise a good amount of money to cover legal permissions, the fees to pay poets for the rights to use their work. This I did by hitting up rich folk to donate to the University of Chicago Press, a 501(c)3 charity, which created a special fund for that purpose.

     After the book came out, I went to lunch with one particularly generous soul, head of a Chicago financial firm, at Chicago Cut Steakhouse. I brought him a copy of the book he had helped fund, as a thank-you present. Before lunch, he encouraged me to order a glass of wine, several times. I looked at him, dumbfounded, and was tempted to say, "You have no idea what this book is about, do you?" I managed to hold that back: the man did contribute a hefty sum to my permissions kitty. What I did say was: "No thanks — wine makes me sleepy." That worked.