Yesterday was my birthday. A few years ago, when I was in a bad place mentally, I didn’t answer my dad’s phone call to wish me a happy birthday. He left a voicemail in which he sang the song to me and hoped I wasn’t just working at the pizza place and went out with friends.
That was about a year before the isolation of Covid times led him to start drinking vodka on the regular. He was never able to stop more than a few months at a time after that, even with rehab, therapy, and AA. It felt like a race between him figuring out how to quit and how long before his body couldn’t give him more chances to do so.
At the start of September, I moved him across the country to be closer to family while he recovered from another round of binge drinking and starving himself. I had quit hard liquor a couple months prior after getting too drunk too fast for comfort at my friend’s wedding. After this weekend I stopped drinking everything else.
At the end of September, he lost the race. He managed to call an ambulance when he realized this detox felt different, walked himself outside to meet them and only passed out when he was on the stretcher. A day later in a medically induced coma complications ended his brain’s faculties and he died. The only sign of what he had been thinking was the book he brought to the ambulance. The last marked page ended with a character scared after an encounter whispering to himself “still alive, still alive.”
I have not drank for 9 months now. I was headed that way before, but now I feel I can’t drink. To do so would disrespect what my dad went through. Yesterday was my birthday. I made plans with my friends for a full day, but before I left I listened to that voicemail for the first time since he left it for me, before I had reason to worry about him, when I was the one he worried about. I miss him so much. I hope he would be proud.
I’ve been hung up on Unnamed Space Idle for a while, an incremental game that involves moving your little ship forwards through little sectors watching it blast infinite enemy ships while numbers go up. It’s insidious how it layers system after system for making those numbers go up to make the whole process interesting. At first you just slot stuff in as it unlocks because there’s space, but then there’s more to equip than you have slots for and you have to start focusing one or two things at a time. There have been days where I have just sat watching and every few minutes clicking something to shave just a few minutes off a major upgrade.