o get back to the question: Am I fixed? Was I broken? I mean, no and maybe. Maybe I wasn't broken enough. AA works best for the seriously desperate, the bottom-scrapers, the last gaspers, those who stopped giving a fuck fuck-all knows how long ago. The truly broken. And for many of them, AA can facilitate what I can only describe as a miraculous transformation. This is the AA most of us are familiar with -- the ultimate makeover session in which the pathetic, self-hating gutter drunk turns into the compassionate, clean, self-respecting man (minus a few teeth). AA has helped to turn around the lives of like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, which is a profound and beautiful thing. Why does it work? I don't know. It just does, and for that reason, the program has my enduring respect, even though I personally never liked going and usually just sat in the same chair, silent, jostling my leg and engaging in this inner monologue about how everybody there was an idiot/asshole and I couldn't wait to get home and smoke 10 cigarettes by myself. Is AA a cult? Probably so. I think of it like a cult/group therapy session/book club. Does it try to brainwash you? Kind of, with I think the fairly reasonable notion that most of the people washed up on its shore could use a little brainscrubbing. Is a cult necessarily a bad thing? No, I don't think so. I don't know when cults got such a nasty rap. Maybe the David Koresh incident. But certainly we could come up with examples of nice, up-with-society kinds of cults. Of course, I can't think of any right now. (MENSA?) One of the reasons I'm reading this muthafucka of a long book, "Infinite Jest," is that one of its storylines takes place in a rehab clinic, and in case you didn't know (I didn't until two years ago) most rehab clinics are AA-based because, even though other methods of controlling drinking have enjoyed media attention -- i.e., moderation management, which championed restricting consumption to say three drinks a night as opposed to AA's Nazi-like total abstinence and whose founder, I believe, died a year or so ago in a car accident when she was shitfaced drunk -- but AA is hands-down the best in terms of people getting sober and staying sober. And "Infinite Jest" is so wonderfully spot-on about AA and the humbling and sometimes magical experience of being in it that I now have absolutely no desire to write anymore about AA, since Wallace nails it so perfectly in that book. I did want to answer the AA part of Julie's question, though. Did I answer it? I think I did. It turns out that most people are fascinated by AA. It has some kind of illicit quality like prison, where people have vague, movie-fed notions of what occurs there and probably go a little cold and drafty inside when I say, "Yeah, I went to AA" but then if they get comfortable enough, always have like a billion questions about what it's like and seem pretty riveted by the responses.

So anyway, I'm drinking now. Or I have been drinking, on a kind of experimental, semi-regular level. And my mom can stop holding her breath, because it's fine. I haven't puked up on anyone's lawn or fallen off my barstool or had one of those black, swiss-cheese evenings. The worst that happens is that I get a little morose, maybe, or loose in the lips. And then also the hangovers, which are worse than I remember. I mean snaggle-toothed suckers, not just the pain but the way they leech my will to do anything other than languish in bed and eat record-setting amounts of Tex-Mex and watch terrible television. That's the part I can't stand. When I just don't give a fuck. I don't care what the rappers say, not giving a fuck is a sucky place for me to be. I'm not exactly glad to be drinking again, which you can probably tell. I have these fantasies of not drinking the way I used to have fantasies of getting drunk. And to tell the truth, I just don't know what I'm going to do about it. But I do feel sober. Sober in the weirdest way. Even when I've had too much to drink and I'm thinking, "Awww, shit. Why'd I drink so much? Now I have to spend tomorrow watching MTV's Cribs marathon and eating five thousand tacos." Sober like I've finally stopped lying about things, maybe. Or just maybe sober like I know I'm not stuck. I don't know how else to explain it.

All right, then. Tomorrow: Regret.