Club Knowlton

Today is Wednesday February Seventeenth Two Thousand Ten. Feeling pretty good this morning even tho I took it easy at the gym. I have been pushing things a bit these last few days so I think its a good idea to be mellow once in a while. I have to remember that your body needs some chill time as much as it needs fitness time. Every year on this day I spend the first hour at work wondering why people have dirt on their foreheads and then it hits me, Ash Wednesday the start of lent. The caths have all sorts of cool ceremonies while us protests don't have didily. Granted, thats the reason why we split from the church in the first place, all the pomp and circumstance but I find the caths interesting. I used to go to mass with my friend Aaron when I was a kid at this totally cool church called LaSallete in Ipswich. I ran into Aaron ten years ago working at the gas station in Danvers. He had this scar running from his forehead to his chin and he mentioned that he was born again. Evidently he smashed his car up, split his face down the middle, and was in a coma for a couple of months. If that happened to me I think I would be born again too.

So, war stories or as they call them in AA drunkalogs. I guess I will start in high school my junior year and the first time I ever dropped acid. It was a spring day and I was with a few friends in our dorm in a Saturday. Someone had scored some paper tabs and I was amazed that this little thing could fuck us up in any way. We hung out in a tent that we outfitted with pillows on the front lawn of our dorm just giggling when one of the dorm masters came out to check out what was going on. We just laughed at him and since we didn't smell like alcohol yet he didn't think anything was wrong. After a few hours in the tent we started to thing of ways to get alcohol which was no small task at a boarding school. Our usual driver wasn't around and we hadn't made peace with the day flick hockey players yet so we didn't have transpo. Once it go dark we all dropped more LSD and went to the boat yard next door to hang out in this fishing boat at the extreme corner of the yard. The acid really hit me then and I remember thinking that the boat was floating even tho it was on the ground. Def good acid that time.

So we are sitting in this boat and thinking how great it would be to start drinking and one of my friends asks out loud, I wonder if any of these boats have liquor bottles in them ? Every time I go out with my family my folks get ripped and they always have some wine and a few beers on board. Most marine locks are more for looks than security so we dispatched the one we were on very quickly. I forget if or what we found on that particular vessel but we went thru one by one almost every boat in the yard and helped ourselves to what was available. We didn't smash anything, we were very careful in removing the locks and I think someone poached some bolt cutters to make the task even easier. The boats in the boat yard next to Knowlton Dorm served liquor to the residents of the dorm for almost a month.

Ah, Knowlton Dorm junior year at Tabor Academy. Doesn't get much better than that, we were such a party dorm that we made up t-shirts with "Club Knowlton" on the front of them. Our dorm master was in the last year of employment with the school and the dorm was top heavy with juniors. For some really, really, stupid reason the school thought that we would cause much less trouble if we were at the end of campus and all in one dorm. That was a mistake and we partied pretty much every day and night that we could. Whenever our dorm master would go away for the weekend we would break into his apartment and use his refer to keep our beer cold. Beer was a tough thing to have at boarding school because you needed many of them to get loaded and then you had the empties to contend with. You could get just as busted with an empty beer as you could with a full one so thats why liquor was so popular in high school. Also in mass we only had package stores at that time, you couldn't buy beer and wine in gas stations. That meant if you were going to get beer you could just as easily get hard liquor.

It was interesting for me to finally get to college and start drinking beer. While I had drank plenty of beer my first choice was always liquor. It wasn't till I got to Jacksonville University that I started drinking hundreds of beers a week and actually enjoyed it. I won't get into JU too much at this point, that experience deserves its own entry because it was an amazing time in my life. What I love about life is that you don't really know when there is going to be an amazing time you are just living it. Then upon reflection you start to realize that parts of your life were more amazing than others. I think that one of my favorite parts of sobriety is the ability to live in the day and know that if you have the strength and willingness you will be able to make it to another day. Sober.